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COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT 



THE UNKNOWN GUEST 



THE WORKS OF MAURICE MAETERLINCK 

ESSAYS 

The Treasure of the Humble 

Wisdom A^'D Destiny 

The Life of the Bee 

The Buried Temple 

The Double Garden 

The Measure of the Hours 

Death 

Ox Emerson, and Other Essays 

Our Eternity 

The Unknown Guest 

PLAYS 
Sister Beatrice and Ardiane and Barbe 

BLJlOE 

JOYZELLE AND MONNA VANNA 

The Blue: Bird, a Fairy Play 

Mary Magdalene 

Pe'lleas and Melisande, and Other Plays 

Princess Maleine 

The Intruder, and Other Plays 

Aglavaine and Selysette 



HOLIDAY EDITIONS 

Our Friend the Dog 
The Swarm 

The Intelligence cf the Flowers 
Chrysanthemums 
The Leaf of Olive 
Thoughts from Maeterlinck 
The Blue Bird 
The Life of the Bee 
News of Spring and Other Nature 
Studies 



The Unknown Guest 

BY 

MAURICE MAETERLINCK 

Translated by 
ALEXANDER TEIXEIRA DE MATTOS 



€ 



NEW YORK 
DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY 

1914 






Copyright, 1914 
By The International Magazine Company 

Copyright, 1914 
By Metropolitan Magazine Company 

Copyright, 1914 
By Harper & Brothers 

Copyright, 1914 
By Dodd. Mead and Company 



OCT 24 1914 

ICI.A387189 



TRANSLATORS NOTE 

Of the ^vt essays in this volume, The 
Knowledge of the Future has appeared in 
the Cosmopolitan Magazine, of New York, 
The Elberfeld Horses In the Metropolitan 
Magazine, of the same city, and The Un- 
known Guest in Harper's Magazine. The 
remainder have not, at this present date, 
been published elsewhere. 

A. T. DE M. 
Chelsea, 20th June, 1914. 



CONTENTS 

PAGE 

translator's note .... 5 



INTRODUCTION 9 

CHAPTER 

I. PHANTASMS OF THE LIVING 

AND THE DEAD .... 23 

II. PSYCHOMETRY 59 

III. THE KNOWLEDGE OF THE 

FUTURE 107 

IV. THE ELBERFELD HORSES . . 219 
V. THE UNKNOWN GUEST . . 36 1 



INTRODUCTION 
I 

MY ESSAY on Death} led me to make 
a conscientious enquiry into the 
present position of the great mystery, an en- 
quiry which I have endeavoured to render 
as complete as possible. I had hoped that 
a single volume would be able to contain 
the result of these investigations, which, 
I may say at once, will teach nothing to 
those who have been over the same ground 
and which have nothing to recommend 
them except their sincerity, their impartial- 
ity and a certain scrupulous accuracy. But, 
as I proceeded, I saw the field widening 
under my feet, so much so that I have been 
obliged to divide my work into two almost 

^Published in English, in an enlarged form, under 
the title of Our Eternity (London and New York, 
1913)- — Translator's Note. 
9 



Introduction 

equal parts. The first Is now published and 
is a brief study of veridical apparitions 
and hallucinations and haunted houses, or, 
if you will, the phantasms of the living and 
the dead; of those manifestations which 
have been oddly and not very appropri- 
ately described as "psychometric"; of the 
knowledge of the future: presentiments, 
omens, premonitions, precognitions and the 
rest ; and lastly of the Elberf eld horses. In 
the second, which will be published later, I 
shall treat of the miracles of Lourdes and 
other places, the phenomena of so-called 
materialization, of the divining-rod and of 
fluidic asepsis, not unmindful withal of a 
diamond dust of the miraculous that hangs 
over the greater marvels in that strange at- 
mosphere into which w^e are about to pass. 



When I speak of the present position of 
the mystery, I of course do not mean the 

10 



Introduction 

mystery of life, its end and its beginnings, 
nor yet the great riddle of the universe 
which lies about us. In this sense, all is 
mystery, and, as I have said elsewhere, is 
likely always to remain so; nor is it prob- 
able that we shall ever touch any point of 
even the utmost borders of knowledge or 
certainty. It is here a question of that 
which, in the midst of this recognized and 
usual mystery, the familiar mystery of 
which we are almost oblivious, suddenly 
disturbs the regular course of our general 
ignorance. In themselves, these facts 
which strike us as supernatural are no more 
so than the others; possibly they are rarer, 
or, to be more accurate, less frequently or 
less easily observed. In any case, their 
deep-seated causes, while being probably 
neither more remote nor more difficult of 
access, seem to lie hidden in an unknown 
region less often visited by our science, 
which after all is but a reassuring and con- 
II 



Introduction 

dilatory expression of our ignorance. To- 
day, thanks to the labours of the Society 
for Psychical Research and a host of other 
seekers, we are able to approach these phe- 
nomena as a whole with a certain confi- 
dence. Leaving the realm of legend, of 
after-dinner stories, old wives' tales, illu- 
sions and exaggerations, we find ourselves 
at last on circumscribed but fairly safe 
ground. This does not mean that there are 
no other supernatural phenomena besides 
those collected in the publications of the 
society in question and in a few of the more 
weighty reviews which have adopted the 
same methods. Notwithstanding all their 
diligence, which for over thirt}^ years has 
been ransacking the obscure corners of our 
planet, it is inevitable that a good many 
things escape their notice, besides which the 
rigour of their investigations makes them 
reject three- fourths of those which are 
brought before them. But we may say 

12 



Introduction 

that the twenty-six volumes of the society's 
Proceedings and the fifteen or sixteen vol- 
umes of its Journal, together with the 
twenty-three annuals of the Annates des 
sciences psychiques, to mention only this 
one periodical of signal excellence, embrace 
for the moment the whole field of the ex- 
traordinary and offer some instances of all 
the abnormal manifestations of the inex- 
plicable. We are henceforth able to 
classify them, to divide and subdivide them 
into genera, species and varieties. This is 
not much, you may say; but it is thus that 
every science begins and furthermore that 
many a one ends. We have therefore suffi-. 
cient evidence, facts that can scarcely be 
disputed, to enable us to consult them prof- 
itably, to recognize whither they lead, to 
form some idea of their general character 
and perhaps to trace their sole source by 
gradually removing the weeds and rubbish 
which for so many hundreds and thou- 
13 



Introduction 

sands of years have hidden it from our 
eyes. 

3 

Truth to tell, these supernatural mani- 
festations seem less marvellous and less 
fantastic than they did some centuries ago; 
and we are at first a little disappointed. 
One would think that even the mysterious 
has its ups and downs and remains subject 
to the caprices of some strange extramun- 
dane fashion ; or perhaps, to be more exact, 
it is evident that the majority of those 
legendary miracles could not withstand the 
rigorous scrutiny of our day. Those which 
emerge triumphant from the test and defy 
our less credulous and more penetrating 
vision are all the more worthy of holding 
our attention. They are not the last sur- 
vivals of the riddle, for this continues 
to exist in its entirety and grows greater 
in proportion as we throw light upon it; 
14 



Introduction 

but we can perhaps see in them the supreme 
or else the first efforts of a force which 
does not appear to reside wholly in our 
sphere. They suggest blows struck from 
without by an Unknown even more un- 
known than that which we think we 
know, an Unknown which is not that of the 
universe, not that which we have gradually 
made into an inoffensive and amiable Un- 
known, even as we have made the universe 
a sort of province of the earth, but a 
stranger arriving from another world, an 
unexpected visitor who comes in a rather 
sinister way to trouble the comfortable 
quiet in which we were slumbering, rocked 
by the firm and watchful hand of orthodox 
science. 

4 

Let us first be content to enumerate them. 
We shall find that we have table-turning, 
with its raps ; the movements and transpor- 
15 



Introduction 

tations of inanimate objects without con- 
tact; luminous phenomena; lucidite, or 
clairvoyance; veridical apparitions or hal- 
lucinations ; haunted houses ; bilocations and 
so forth; communications with the dead; 
the divining-rod; the miraculous cures of 
Lourdes and elsewhere ; fluidic asepsis ; and 
lastly the famous thinking anim^als of El- 
berfeld and Mannheim. These, if I be not 
mistaken, after eliminating all that is in- 
sufficiently attested, constitute the residue 
or caput mortuum of this latter-day miracle. 
Everybody has heard of table-turning, 
which may be called the A B C of occult 
science. It is so common and so easily pro- 
duced that the Society for Psychical Re- 
search has not thought it necessary to de- 
vote special attention to the subject. I need 
hardly add that we must take count only 
of movements or "raps" obtained without 
the hands touching the table, so as to re- 
move every possibility of fraud or un- 
i6 



Introduction 

conscious complicity. To obtain these 
movements it is enough, but it is also in- 
dispensable that those who form the 
"chain" should include a person endowed 
with mediumistic faculties. I repeat, the 
experiment is within the reach of any one 
who cares to try it under the requisite con- 
ditions ; and it is as incontestable as the po- 
larization of light or as crystallization by 
means of electric currents. 

In the same group may be placed the 
movement and transportation of objects 
without contact, the touches of spirit hands, 
the luminous phenomena and materializa- 
tions. Like table-turning, they demand the 
presence of a medium. I need not observe 
that we here find ourselves in the happy 
hunting-ground of the impostor and that 
even the most powerful mediums, those pos- 
sessing the most genuine and undeniable 
gifts, such as the celebrated Eusapia Pala- 
dino, are upon occasion — and the occasion 
17 



Introduction 

occurs but too often — incorrigible cheats. 
But, when we have made every allowance 
for fraud, there nevertheless remains a con- 
siderable number of incidents so rigorously 
attested that we must needs accept them or 
else abandon all human certainty. 

The case is not quite the same with levi- 
tatlon and the wonders performed, so trav- 
ellers tell us, by certain Indian jugglers. 
Though the prolonged burial of a living 
being is very nearly proved and can doubt- 
less be physiologically explained, there are 
many other tricks on which w^e have so far 
no authoritative pronouncement. I will not 
speak of the "mango-tree" and the "basket- 
trick," which are mere conjuring; but the 
"lire-walk" and the famous "rope-climbing- 
trick" remain more of a mystery. 

The fire-walk, or walk on red-hot bricks 
or glowing coals, is a sort of religious cere- 
mony practised in the Indies, in some of 
the Polynesian islands, in Mauritius and 
i8 



Introduction ^ 

elsewhere. As the result of incantations ut- 
tered by the high-priest, the bare feet of 
the faithful who follow him upon the bed 
of burning pebbles or brands seem to be- 
come almost insensible to the touch of fire. 
Travellers are anything but agreed whether 
the heat of the surface traversed is really 
intolerable, whether the extraordinary 
power of endurance is explained by the 
thickness of the horny substance which pro- 
tects the soles of the natives' feet, whether 
the feet are burnt or whether the skin re- 
mains untouched; and, under present con- 
ditions, the question is too uncertain to 
make it worth while to linger over it. 

"Rope-climbing" is more extraordinary. 
The juggler takes his stand in an open 
space, far from any tree or house. He is 
accompanied by a child; and his only 
impedimenta are a bundle of ropes and an 
old canvas sack. The juggler throws one 
end of the rope up in the air; and the rope, 
19 



Introduction 

as though drawn by an invisible hook, un- 
coils and rises straight into the sky until 
the end disappears; and, soon after, there 
come tumbling from the blue two arms, two 
legs, a head and so on, all of which the wiz- 
ard picks up and crams into the sack. He 
next utters a few magic words over it and 
opens it; and the child steps out, bowing 
and smiling to the spectators. 

This is the usual form taken by this par- 
ticular sorcery. It is pretty rare and seems 
to be practised only by one sect which origi- 
nated in the North-West Provinces. It has 
not yet perhaps been sufficiently investi- 
gated to take its place among the evidence 
mentioned above. If it were really as I 
have described, it could hardly be explained 
save by some strange hallucinatory power 
emanating from the juggler or illusionist, 
who influences the audience by suggestion 
and makes it see what he wishes. In that 
case the suggestion or hallucination covers 

20 



Introduction 

a very extensive area. In point of fact, 
onlookers, Europeans, on the balconies of 
houses at some distance from the crowd of 
natives, have been known to experience the 
same influence. This would be one of the 
most curious manifestations of that "un- 
known guest" of which we shall speak 
again later when, after enumerating its acts 
and deeds, we try to investigate and note 
down the eccentricities of its character. 

Levitation in the proper sense of the 
word, that is to say, the raising, with- 
out contact, and floating of an inani- 
mate object or even of a person, might 
possibly be due to the same hallu- 
cinatory power; but hitherto the instances 
have not been sufficiently numerous or au- 
thentic to allow us to draw any conclusions. 
Also we shall meet with it again when we 
come to the chapter treating of the mate- 
rializations of which it forms part. 



21 



CHAPTER I 



PHANTASMS OF THE LIVING 
AND THE DEAD 



THE UNKNOWN GUEST 

CHAPTER I 

PHANTASMS OF THE LIVING AND 
THE DEAD 



THIS brings us without any break to 
the consideration of veridical appari- 
tions and hallucinations and finally to 
haunted houses. We all know that the 
phantasms of the living and the dead have 
now a whole literature of their own, a lit- 
erature which owes its birth to the numer- 
ous and conscientious enquiries conducted in 
England, France, Belgium and the United 
States at the instance of the Society for 
Psychical Research. In the presence of the 
mass of evidence collected, it would be ab- 
surd to persist in denying the reality of the 

25 



The Unknown Guest 

phenomena themselves. It is by this time 
incontestable that a violent or deep emo- 
tion can be transmitted instantaneously 
from one mind to another, however great 
the distance that separates the mind experi- 
encing the emotion from the mind receiving 
the communication. It is most often mani- 
fested by a visual hallucination, more rarely 
by an auditory hallucination; and, as the 
most violent emotion which man can un- 
dergo is that which grips and overwhelms 
him at the approach or at the very moment 
of death, it is nearly always this supreme 
emotion which he sends forth and directs 
with incredible precision through space, if 
necessary across seas and continents, 
towards an invisible and moving goal. 
Again, though this occurs less frequently, 
a grave danger, a serious crisis can beget 
and transmit to a distance a similar hal- 
lucination. This is what the S. P. R. calls 
"phantasms of the living." When the hal- 
26 



The Unknown Guest 

luclnatlon takes place some time after the 
decease of the person whom It seems to 
evoke, be the interval long or short, it is 
classed among the ^'phantasms of the 
dead." 

The latter, the so-called "phantasms of 
the dead," are the rarest. As F. W. H. 
Myers pointed out in his Human Personal- 
ity, a consideration of the proportionate 
number of apparitions observed at various 
periods before and after death shows that 
they increase very rapidly for the few hours 
which precede death and decrease grad- 
ually during the hours and days which 
follow; while after about a year's time 
they become extremely rare and excep- 
tional. 

However exceptional they may be, these 
apparitions nevertheless exist and are 
proved, as far as anything can be proved, 
by abundant testimony of a very precise 
character. Instances will be found in the 
27 



The Unknown Guest 

Proceedings, notably in vol. vi., pp. 13-65, 
etc. 

Whether It be a case of the living, the 
dying, or the dead, we are familiar with 
the usual form which these hallucinations 
take. Indeed their main outlines hardly 
ever var}*. Some one, in his bedroom, in 
the street, on a journey, no matter where, 
suddenly sees plainly and clearly the phan- 
tom of a relation or a friend of whom he 
was not thinking at the time and whom he 
knows to be thousands of miles away, in 
America, Asia or Africa as the case may 
be, for distance does not count. As a rule, 
the phantom says nothing; its presence, 
which is always brief, is but a sort of silent 
warning. Sometimes it seems a prey to 
futile and trivial anxieties. More rarely, 
it speaks, though saying but little after all. 
More rarely still, It reveals something that 
has happened, a crime, a hidden treasure 
of which no one else could know. But we 
28 



The Unknown Guest 

will return to these matters after complet- 
ing this brief enumeration. 



The phenomenon of haunted houses re- 
sembles that of the phantasms of the dead, 
except that here the ghost clings to the 
residence, the house, the building and in 
no way to the persons who inhabit it. By 
the second year of its existence, that is to 
say, 1884, the Committee on Haunted 
Houses of the S. P. R. had selected and 
made an analysis of some sixty-five cases 
out of hundreds submitted to it, twenty- 
eight of which rested upon first-hand and 
superior evidence.^ It is worthy of remark, 
in the first place, that these authentic nar- 
ratives bear no relation whatever to the 
legendary and sensational ghost-stories that 
still linger in many English and American 

^Proceedings, vol. i., pp. 101-115; vol. ii., pp. 137- 
151; vol. viii., pp. 311, 332, etc. 

20 



The Unknown Guest 

magazines, especially in the Christmas num- 
bers. They mention no winding-sheets, 
coffins, skeletons, graveyards, no sulphurous 
flames, curses, blood-curdling groans, no 
clanking chains, nor any of the time- 
honoured trappings that characterize this 
rather feeble literature of the supernatural. 
On the contrary, the scenes enacted in 
houses that appear to be really haunted are 
generally very simple and insignificant, not 
to say dull and commonplace. The ghosts 
are quite unpretentious and go to no ex- 
pense in the matter of staging or costume. 
They are clad as they were when, some- 
times many years ago, they led their quiet, 
unadventurous life within their own home. 
We find in one case an old woman, with a 
thin grey shawl meekly folded over her 
breast, who bends at night over the sleep- 
ing occupants of her old home, or who is 
frequently encountered in the hall or on 
the stairs, silent, mysterious, a little grim. 
30 



The Unknown Guest 

Or else It is the gentleman with a lack- 
lustre eye and a figured dressing-gown who 
walks along a passage brilliantly illu- 
minated with an inexplicable light. Or 
again we have another elderly lady, dressed 
in black, who Is often found seated in the 
bow-window of her drawing-room. When 
spoken to, she rises and seems on the point 
of replying, but says nothing. When pur- 
sued or met in a corner, she eludes all con- 
tact and vanishes. Strings are fastened 
across the staircase with glue; she passes 
and the strings remain as they were. The 
ghost — and this happens in the majority of 
cases — is seen by all the people staying in 
the house: relations, friends, old servants 
and new. Can it be a matter of suggestion, 
of collective hallucination? At any rate, 
strangers, visitors who have had nothing 
said to them, see It as the others do and 
ask, innocently: 

31 



The U-;^:^:'.vn Guest 

"Who is the lady in n::ur: .i:.^ r ::- I 
met in the dining-room?" 

If it is a case of collective suggestion, 
we should have to admit that it is a sub- 
conscious suggestion emitted without the 
knowledge of the participants, which indeed 
is quite possible. 

Th: id rhey belong to the same order, 
I —[[[ ':\t:z :::ention the exploits of what 
die Gerniuns : d :he Poltergeist, which take 
the form of i::.^:r.z stones, ringing beUs, 
turning mattresses ist— ing furrdrure and 
so forth. These matters are always open 
to suspicion and reaUy appear to be nc :dd r 
but quaint frolics of hysterical subjects or 
of mediums indulging their sense of hu- 
mour. The manifestations of the Polter- 
geist are fairly numerous and the reader 
will find several instances m the Proceedings 
and especially in the Journal of the S. P. R. 

As for communications with the dead, I 
devoted a whole chapter to these in my 
32 



The Unknown Guest 

essay entitled Our Eternity and will not 
return to them now. It will be enough to 
recall and recapitulate my general impres- 
sion, that probably the dead did not enter 
into any of these conversations. We are 
here concerned with purely mediumistic 
phenomena, more curious and more subtle 
than those of table-rapping, but of the same 
character; and these manifestations, how- 
ever astonishing they may be, do not pierce 
the terrestrial sphere wherein we are im- 
prisoned. 



Setting aside the religious hypotheses, 
which we are not examining here, for they 
belong to a different order of ideas,^ we 
find, as an explanation of the majority of 

^ ^On the same grounds, we will also leave on one 
side the theosophical hypothesis, which, like the others, 
begins by calling for an act of adherence, of blind 
faith. Its explanations, though often ingenious, are no 
more than forcible but gratuitous asseverations and, 
as I said in Our Eternity, do not give us the shadow 
of the commencennent of a proof. 

33 



The Unknown Guest 

these phenomena, or at least as a means of 
avoiding an absolute and depressing silence 
in regard to them, two hypotheses which 
reach the unknown by more or less diverg- 
ent paths, to wit, the spiritualistic hypothe- 
sis and the mediumistic hypothesis. The 
spiritualists, or rather the neospiritualists 
or scientific spiritualists, who must not be 
confused with the somewhat over-credulous 
disciples of Allan Kardec, maintain that 
the dead do not die entirely, that their spir- 
itual or animistic entity neither departs nor 
disperses into space after the dissolution of 
the body, but continues an active though 
invisible existence around us. The neospir- 
itualistic theory, however, professes only 
very vague notions as to the life led by 
these discarnate spirits. Are they more in- 
telligent than they were when they inhabited 
their flesh ? Do they possess a wider under- 
standing and mightier faculties than ours? 
Up to the present, we have not the unim- 

34 



The Unknown Guest 

peachable facts that would permit us to say- 
so. It would seem, on the contrary, if the 
discarnate spirits really continue to exist, 
that their life is circumscribed, frail, pre- 
carious, incoherent and, above all, not very 
long. To this the objection is raised that 
it only appears so to our feeble eyes. The 
dead among whom we move without know- 
ing it struggle to make themselves under- 
stood, to manifest themselves, but dash 
themselves against the impenetrable wall of 
our senses, which, created solely to perceive 
matter, remain hopelessly ignorant of all 
the rest, though this is doubtless the essen- 
tial part of the universe. That which will 
survive in us, imprisoned in our body, is 
absolutely inaccessible to that which sur- 
vives in them. The utmost that they can 
do is occasionally to cause a few glimmers 
of their existence to penetrate the fissures of 
those singular organisms known as me- 
diums. But these vagrant, fleeting, ven- 
35 



The Unknown Guest 

turous, stifled, deformed glimmers can but 
give us a ludicrous idea of a life which 
has no longer anything in common with the 
life — purely animal for the most part — 
which we lead on this earth. It is possible; 
and there is something to be said for the 
theory. It is at any rate remarkable that 
certain communications, certain manifesta- 
tions have shaken the scepticism of the cold- 
est and most dispassionate men of science, 
men utterly hostile to supernatural influ- 
ences. In order to some extent to under- 
stand their uneasiness and their astonish- 
ment, we need only read — to quote but one 
instance among a thousand — a disquieting 
but unassailable article, entitled, Dans les 
regions inexplorees de la biologie hiimaine. 
Observations et experiences sur Eusapia 
Paladino, by Professor Bottazzi, Director 
of the Physiological Institute of the Uni- 
versity of Naples.^ Seldom have experi- 

^Jnnales des sciences psychiques: April-November 
1907. ^^ 



The Unknown Guest 

ments in the domain of mediums or spirits 
been conducted with more distrustful sus- 
picion or with more implacable scientific 
strictness. Nevertheless, scattered limbs, 
pale, diaphanous but capable hands, sud- 
denly appeared in the little physiological 
laboratory of Naples University, with Its 
doors heavily padlocked and sealed, as it 
were, mathematically excluding any possibil- 
ity of fraud; these same hands worked ap- 
paratus specially intended to register their 
touches; lastly, the outline of something 
black, of a head, uprose between the cur- 
tains of the medlumistic cabinet, remained 
visible for several seconds and did not re- 
tire until itself apparently frightened by the 
exclamations of surprise drawn from a 
group of scientists who, after all, were pre- 
pared for anything; and Professor Bot- 
tazzi confesses that It was then that, to 
quote his own words — measured words, 
as beseems a votary of science, but ex- 
Z7 



The Unknown Guest 

pressive — he felt "a shiver all through his 
body." 

It was one of those moments in which a 
doubt which one had thought for ever 
abolished grips the most unbelieving. For 
the first time, perhaps, he looked around 
him with uncertainty^ and wondered in what 
world he was. As for the faithful ad- 
herents of the unknown, who had long 
understood that we must resign ourselves 
to understanding nothing and be prepared 
for every sort of surprise, there was here, 
all the same, even for them, a mystery of 
another character, a bewildering mystery, 
the only really strange myster}^ more tor- 
turing than all the others together, because 
it verges upon ancestral fears and touches 
the most sensitive point of our destiny. 



The spiritualistic argument most w^orthy 
of attention is that supplied by the appari- 
38 



The Unknown Guest 

tions of the dead and by haunted houses. 
We will take no account of the phantasms 
that precede, accompany or follow hard 
upon death: they are explained by the 
transmission of a violent emotion from one 
subconsciousness to another; and, even 
when they are not manifested until several 
days after death, it may still be contended 
that they are delayed telepathic communi- 
cations. But what are we to say of the 
ghosts that spring up more than a year, 
nay, more than ten years after the disap- 
pearance of the corpse? They are very 
rare, I know, but after all there are some 
that are extremely difficult to deny, for the 
accounts of their actions are attested and 
corroborated by numerous and trustworthy 
witnesses. It Is true that here again, 
where it Is In most cases a question of ap- 
paritions to relations or friends, we may be 
told that we are in the presence of tele- 
pathic incidents or of hallucinations of the 

39 



The Unknown Guest 

memory. We thus deprive the splrltuahsts 
of a nev/ and considerable province of their 
realm. Nevertheless, they retain certain 
private demesnes into which our telepathic 
explanations do not penetrate so easily. 
There have in fact been ghosts that showed 
themselves to people who had never known 
or seen them in the flesh. They are more 
or less closely connected with the ghosts in 
haunted houses, to which we must revert 
for a moment. 

As I said above, it is almost impossible 
honestly to deny the existence of these 
houses. Here again the telepathic inter- 
pretation enforces itself in the majority of 
cases. We may even allow it a strange but 
justifiable extension, for its limits are 
scarcely known. It has happened fairly 
often, for instance, that ghosts come to dis- 
turb a dwelling whose occupiers find, in 
response to their indications, bones hidden 
in the walls or under the floors. It is even 
40 



The Unknown Guest 

possible, as In the case of William Molr,^ 
which was as strictly conducted and super- 
vised as a judicial enquiry, that the skeleton 
Is burled at some distance from the house 
and dates more than forty years back. 
When the remains are removed and de- 
cently interred, the apparitions cease. 

But even in the case of William Moir 
there is no sufficient reason for abandoning 
the telepathic theory. The medium, the 
"sensitive," as the English say, feels the 
presence or the proximity of the bones; 
some relation established between them and 
him — a relation which certainly is pro- 
foundly mysterious — makes him experience 
the last emotion of the deceased and som.e- 
times allows him to conjure up the picture 
and the circumstances of the suicide or 
murder, even as, in telepathy between liv- 
ing persons, the contact of an inanimate 
object is able to bring him Into direct rela- 
'^Proceedings, vol. vi., pp. 35-41. 
41 



The Unknown Guest 

tlon with the subconsciousness of its owner. 
The slender chain connecting life and death 
is not yet entirely broken; and we might 
even go so far as to say that everything 
is still happening within our world. 

But are there cases in which every link, 
however thin, however subtle we may deem 
it, IS definitely shattered? Who would 
venture to maintain this? We are only 
beginning to suspect the elasticity, the flexi- 
bility, the complexity of those invisible 
threads which bind together objects, 
thoughts, lives, emotions, all that is on this 
earth and even that which does not yet 
exist to that which exists no longer. Let 
us take an instance in the first volume of 
the Proceedings: Mr. X. Z., who was 
known to most of the members of the Com- 
mittee on Haunted Houses, and whose evi- 
dence was above suspicion, went to reside 
in a large old house, part of which was 
occupied by his friend Mr. G — . Mr. 
42 



The Unknown Guest 

X. Z. knew nothing of the history of the 
place except that two servants of Mr. G — 's 
had given him notice on account of strange 
noises which they had heard. One night — 
it was the 22nd of September — Mr. X. Z., 
on his way up to his bedroom in the dark, 
saw the whole passage filled with a dazzling 
and uncanny light, and in this strange light 
he saw the figure of an old man in a flow- 
ered dressing-gown. As he looked, both 
figure and light vanished and he was left 
in pitch darkness. The next day, remem- 
bering the tales told by the two servants, 
he made enquiries in the village. At first 
he could find out nothing, but finally an old 
lawyer told him that he had heard that the 
grandfather of the present owner of the 
house had strangled his wife and then cut 
his own throat on the very spot where Mr. 
X. Z. had seen the apparition. He was 
unable to give the exact date of this double 
event; but Mr. X. Z. consulted the parish 
43 



The Unknown Guest 

register and found that it had taken place 
on a 22nd of September. 

On the 22nd of September of the fol- 
lowing year, a friend of Mr. G — 's arrived 
to make a short stay. The morning after 
his arrival, he came down, pale and tired, 
and announced his intention of leaving im- 
mediately. On being questioned, he con- 
fessed that he was afraid, that he had been 
kept awake all night by the sound of groans, 
blasphemous oaths and cries of despair, 
that his bedroom door had been opened, 
and so forth. 

Three years afterT\-ards, Mr. X. Z. had 
occasion to call on the landlord of the 
house, who lived in London, and saw over 
the mantelpiece a picture which bore a strik- 
ing resemblance to the figure which he had 
seen in the passage. He pointed it out to 
his friend Mr. G — , saying: 

'That is the man whom I saw." 

The landlord, in reply to their questions, 
44 



The Unknown Guest 

said that the painting was a portrait of his 
grandfather, adding that he had been "no 
credit to the family." 

Evidently, this does not in any way prove 
the existence of ghosts or the survival of 
man. It is quite possible that, in spite of 
Mr. X. Z.'s undoubted good faith, imagina- 
tion played a subtle but powerful part in 
these marvels. Perhaps it was set going by 
the stones of the two servants, insignificant 
gossip to which no attention was paid at the 
time, but which probably found its way 
down into the weird and fertile depths of 
the subconsciousness. The image was next 
transmitted by suggestion to the visitor 
frightened by a sleepless night. As for the 
recognition of the portrait, this is either 
the weakest or the most impressive part of 
the story, according to the theory that is 
being defended. 

It is none the less certain that there is 
some unfairness in suggesting this explana- 
45 



The Unknown Guest 

tion for every incident of the kind. It 
means stretching to the uttermost and per- 
haps stretching too far the elastic powers of 
that amiable maid-of-all-work, telepathy. 
For that matter, there are cases in which 
the telepathic interpretation is even more 
uncertain, as in that described by Miss 
R. C. Morton in vol. viii. of the 
Proceedings, 

The story is too long and complicated to 
be reproduced here. It is unnecessary to 
observe that, in view of the character of 
Miss Morton, a lady of scientific training, 
and of the quality of the corroborative tes- 
timony, the facts themselves seem incon- 
testable. 

The case is that of a house built in i860, 
whose first occupier was an Anglo-Indian, 
the next tenant being an old man and the 
house then remaining unlet for four years. 
In 1882, when Captain Morton and his 
family moved in, there had never, so far 
46 



The Unknown Guest 

as they knew, been any question of Its being 
haunted. Three months afterwards, Miss 
Morton was In her room and on the point of 
getting Into bed, when she heard some one 
at the door and went to it, thinking that it 
might be her mother. On opening the door, 
she found no one there, but, going a few 
steps along the passage, she saw a tall lady, 
dressed In black, standing at the head of the 
stairs. She did not wish to make the others 
uneasy and mentioned the occurrence to no 
one except a friend, who did not live In the 
neighbourhood. 

But soon the same figure dressed In black 
was seen by the various members of the 
household, by a married sister on a visit to 
the house, by the father, by the other 
sisters, by a little boy, by a neighbour, 
General A — , who saw a lady crying In the 
orchard and, thinking that one of the 
daughters of the house was 111, sent to en- 
quire after her. Even the Mortons' two 

47 



The Unknown Guest 

dogs on more than one occasion clearly 
showed that they saw the phantom. 

It was, as a matter of fact, very harmless : 
it said nothing; it wanted nothing; it wan- 
dered from room to room, without any ap- 
parent object; and, when it was spoken to, 
it did not answer and only made its escape. 
The household became accustomed to the 
apparition ; it troubled nobody and inspired 
no terror. It was immaterial, it could not 
be touched, but yet it intercepted the light. 
After making enquiries, they succeeded in 
identifying it as the second wife of the 
Anglo-Indian. The Morton family had 
never seen the lady, but, from the description 
which they gave of the phantom to those 
who had known her, it appeared that the 
likeness was unmistakable. For the rest, 
they did not knov^^ why she came back to 
haunt a house in which she had not died. 
After 1887, the appearances became less fre- 
quent, distinct, ceasing altogether in 1889. 
48 



The Unknown Guest 

5 
Let us assume that the facts as reported 

in the Proceedings are certain and Indis- 
putable. We have very nearly the ideal 
case, free from previous or ambient sugges- 
tion. If we refuse to believe In the exist- 
ence of ghosts, if we are absolutely posi- 
tive that the dead do not survive their 
death, then we must admit that the hal- 
lucination took birth spontaneously In the 
imagination of Miss Morton, an uncon- 
scious medium, and was subsequently trans- 
mitted by telepathy to all those around her. 
In my opinion, this explanation, however 
arbitrary and severe It may be. Is the one 
which It behoves us to accept, pending 
further proofs. But It must be confessed 
that, in thus extending our Incredulity, we 
render it very difficult for the dead to make 
their existence knovm. 

We possess a certain number of cases of 
this kind, rigorously investigated, cases 



The Unknown Guest 

probably representing but an infinitesimal 
part of those which might be collected. Is 
it possible that they one and all elude the 
telepathic explanation ? It would be neces- 
sary to make a study of them, conducted 
with the most scrupulous and unremitting 
attention ; for the question is not devoid of 
interest. If the existence of ghosts were 
well-established, it would mean the entrance 
into this world, which we believe to be our 
world, of a new force that would explain 
more than one thing v\^hich we are still far 
from understanding. If the dead interfere 
at one point, there is no reason why they 
should not interfere at every other point. 
We should no longer be alone, among our- 
selves, in our hermetically-closed sphere, as 
we are perhaps only too ready to imagine 
it. We should have to alter more than 
one of our physical and moral laws, more 
than one of our ideas; and it would no 
doubt be the most important and the most 
50 



The Unknown Guest 

extraordinary revelation that would be ex- 
pected in the present state of our knowl- 
edge and since the disappearance of the 
old positive religions. But we are not 
there yet: the proof of all this is still in 
the nursery-stage; and I do not know if 
it will ever get beyond that. Nevertheless 
the fact remains that, in these impenetrable 
regions of mystery which we are now ex- 
ploring, the one weak spot lies here, the 
one wall in which there seems to be a chink 
— a strange one enough — giving a glimpse 
into the other world. It is narrow and 
vague and behind it there is still darkness; 
but it Is not without significance and we 
shall do well not to lose sight of it. 

6 

Let us observe that this survival of the 
dead, as the neospiritualists conceive it, 
seems much less improbable since we have 
been studying more closely the manifesta- 

51 



The Unknown Guest 

tlons of the extraordinary and incontestable 
spiritual force that lies hidden within our- 
selves. It is not dependent on our thought, 
nor on our consciousness, nor on our will; 
and very possibly it is not dependent 
either on our life. While we are still 
breathing on this earth, it is already sur- 
mounting most of the great obstacles that 
limit and paralyse our existence. It acts at 
a distance and so to speak without organs. 
It passes through matter, disaggregates it 
and reconstitutes it. It seems to possess 
the gift of ubiquity. It is not subject to 
the laws of gravity and lifts weights out of 
all proportion with the real and measur- 
able strength of the body whence it is be- 
lieved to emanate. It releases and removes 
itself from that body; it comes and goes 
freely and takes to itself substances and 
shapes which it borrows all around it; and 
therefore it is no longer so strange to see 
it surviving for a time that body to which 
52 



The Unknown Guest 

it does not appear to be as indlssolubly 
bound as is our conscious existence. Is it 
necessary to add that this survival of a 
part of ourselves which we hardly know 
and which besides seems incomplete, inco- 
herent and ephemeral is wholly without 
prejudice to our fate in the eternity of the 
worlds? But this is a question which we 
are not called upon to study here. 

I shall perhaps be asked: 

"If it is becoming increasingly difficult 
for all these facts — and there are more of 
them accumulating every day — to be em- 
braced in the telepathic or psychometric 
theory, why not frankly accept the spiritual- 
istic explanation, which is the simplest, 
which has an answer for everything and 
which is gradually encroaching on all the 
others?" 

That is true: it is the simplest theory, 
perhaps too simple; and, like the religious 
theory, it dispenses us from all effort or 
53 



The Unknown Guest 

seeking. We have nothing to set against 
It but the mediumistic theory, which doubt- 
less does not account exactly for a good 
many things, but which at least is on the 
same side of the hill of life as ourselves 
and remains among us, upon our earth, 
within reach of our eyes, our hands, our 
thoughts and our researches. There was 
a time when lightning, epidemics and earth- 
quakes were attributed without distinction 
to the wrath of Heaven. Nowadays, when 
we are more or less familiar with the source 
of the great Infectious diseases, the hand 
of Providence knows them no more; and, 
though we are still ignorant of the nature 
of electricity and the laws that regulate 
seismic shocks, we no longer dream, while 
waiting to learn more about them, of look- 
ing for their causes In the judgment or 
anger of an Imaginary Being. Let us act 
likewise In the present case. It behoves 
us above all to avoid those rash explana- 
54 



The Unknown Guest 

tions which, in their haste, leave by the 
roadside a host of things that appear to 
be unknown or unknowable only because 
the necessary effort has not yet been made 
to know them. After all, while we must 
not eliminate the spiritualistic theory, 
neither must we content ourselves with it. 
It is even preferable not to linger over it 
until it has supplied us with decisive argu- 
ments, for it is the duty of this theory which 
sweeps us roughly out of our sphere to 
furnish us with such arguments. For the 
present, it simply relegates to posthumous 
regions phenomena that appear to occur 
within ourselves; it adds superfluous mys- 
tery and needless difficulty to the medium- 
istic mystery whence it springs. If we were 
concerned with facts that had no footing in 
this world, we should certainly have to turn 
our eyes in another direction; but we see a 
large number of actions performed which 
are of the same nature as those attributed 
55 



The Unknown Guest 

to the spirits and equally inexplicable, ac- 
tions with which, however, we know thac 
they have nothing to do. When it is 
proved that the dead exercise some inter- 
vention, we will bow before the fact as will- 
ingly as we bow before the mediumistic 
mysteries: it is a question of order, of in- 
ternal policy and of scientific method much 
more than of probability, preference or 
fear. The hour has not yet come to aban- 
don the principle which I have formulated 
elsewhere with respect to our communica- 
tions with the dead, namely, that it is natu- 
ral that we should remain at home, in our 
own world, as long as we can, as long as 
we are not violently driven from it by a 
series of irresistible and incontrovertible 
proofs coming from the neighbouring abyss. 
The survival of a spirit is no more improb- 
able than the prodigious faculties which we 
are obliged to attribute to the mediums if 
we deny them to the dead. But the exist- 
56 



The Unknown Guest 

ence of mediums is beyond dispute, whereas 
that of spirits is not; and it is therefore 
for the spirits or for those who make use 
of their name to begin by proving that they 
exist. Before turning towards the mystery 
beyond the grave, let us first exhaust the 
possibilities of the mystery here on earth. 



57 



CHAPTER II 

PSYCHOMETRY 



CHAPTER II 

PSYCHOMETRY 
I 

NOW that we have eliminated the gods 
and the dead, what have we left? 
Ourselves and all the life around us; and 
that Is perhaps enough. It Is, at any rate, 
much more than we are able to grasp. 

Let us now study certain manifestations 
that are absolutely similar to those which 
we attribute to the spirits and quite as sur- 
prising. As for these manifestations, there 
is not the least doubt of their origin. They 
do not come from the other world ; they are 
born and die upon this earth ; and they arise 
solely and Incontestably from our own ac- 
tual living mystery. They are, moreover, 
of all psychic manifestations, those which 
are easiest to examine and verify, seeing 
6i 



The Unknown Guest 

that they can be repeated almost indefinitely 
and that a number of excellent and well- 
known mediums are always ready to repro- 
duce them in the presence of any one inter- 
ested in the question. It is no longer a 
case of uncertain and casual observation, 
but of scientific experiment. 

The manifestations in question are so 
many phenomena of intuition, of clairvoy- 
ance or clairaudience, of seeing at a dis- 
tance and even of seeing the future. These 
phenomena may either be due to pure, spon- 
taneous intuition on the part of the medium, 
in an hypnotic or waking state, or else pro- 
duced or facilitated by one of the various 
empirical methods which apparently serve 
only to arouse the medium^s subconscious 
faculties and to release in some way his 
subliminal clairvoyance. Among such 
methods, those most often employed are, 
as we all know, cards, coffee-grounds, pins, 
the lines of the hand, crystal globes, astrol- 
62 



% 



The Unknown Guest 

ogy, and so on. They possess no Impor- 
tance in themselves, no intrinsic virtue, and 
are worth exactly what the medium who 
uses them Is worth. As M. Duchatel well 
says: 

"In reality, there is only one solitary 
mancy. The faculty of seeing In time, like 
the faculty of seeing in space, Is one, what- 
ever Its outward form or the process em- 
ployed." 

We will not linger now over those mani- 
festations which, under appearances that 
are sometimes childish and vulgar, often 
conceal surprising and Incontestable truths, 
but will devote the present chapter ex- 
clusively to a series of phenomena which 
includes almost all the others and which has 
been classed under the generic and rather 
ill-chosen and ill-constructed title of "psy- 
chometry." Psychometry, to borrow Dr. 
Maxwell's excellent definition, Is **the fac- 
^3 



The Unknown Guest 

ulty possessed by certain persons of placing 
themselves in relation, either spontaneously 
or, for the most part, through the inter- 
mediary of some object, with unknown and 
often very distant things and people." 

The existence of this faculty is no longer 
seriously denied; and it Is easy for any one 
who cares to do so to verify It for himself; 
for the mediums who possess It are not ex- 
tremely rare, nor are they Inaccessible. It 
has formed the subject of a number of ex- 
periments (see, among others, M. Warcol- 
lier's report in the Annates des sciences 
psychiques of July, 191 1) and of a few 
treatises, in the front rank of which I would 
mention M. Duchatel's Enquete sur des cas 
de psychometrie and Dr. Osty's recently 
published book, Lucidite et intuition, which 
is the fullest, most profound and most con- 
scientious work that we possess on the mat- 
ter up to the present. Nevertheless it may 
be said that these regions quite lately an- 
64 



The Unknown Guest 

nexed by metapsychical science are as yet 
hardly explored and that fruitful surprises 
are doubtless awaiting earnest seekers. 

The faculty In question Is one of the 
strangest faculties of our subconsciousness 
and beyond a dou^Jt contains the key to 
most of the manifestations that seem to pro- 
ceed from another world. Let us begin 
by seeing, with the aid of a living and typ- 
ical example, how it Is exercised. 

Mme. M , one of the best mediums 

mentioned by Dr. Osty, Is given an object 
which belonged to or which has been 
touched and handled by a person about 
whom it is proposed to question her. Mme. 

M operates In a state of trance; but 

there are other noted psychometers, such as 

Mme. F and M. Ph. M. de F , 

who retain all their normal consciousness, 

so that hypnotism or the somnambulistic 

65 



The Unknown Guest 

state is In no way indispensable to the 
awakening of this extraordinary faculty of 
clairvoyance. 

When the object, which is usually a let- 
ter, has been handed to Mme. M , she 

is asked to place herself in communication 
with the writer of the letter or the owner 

of the object. Forthwith, Mme. M 

not only sees the person in question, his 
physical appearance, his character, his 
habits, his interests, his state of health, but 
also, in a series of rapid and changing vi- 
sions that follow upon one another like 
cinematograph pictures, perceives and de- 
scribes exactly his immediate surroundings, 
the scenery outside his window, the rooms 
in which he lives, the people who live with 
him and who wish him well or ill, the psy- 
chology and the most secret and unexpected 
intentions of all those who figure in his 
existence. If, by means of your questions, 
you direct her towards the past, she traces 



The Unknown Guest 

the whole course of the subject's history. 
If you turn her towards the future, she 
seems often to discover it as clearly as the 
past. But we will for the moment reserve 
this latter point, to which we shall return 
later in a chapter devoted to the knowledge 
of the future. 

3 

In the presence of these phenomena, the 

first thought that naturally occurs to the 
mind is that we are once more concerned 
with that astonishing and involuntary com- 
munication between one subconsciousness 
and another which has been invested with 
the name of telepathy. And there is no de- 
nying that telepathy plays a great part in 
these intuitions. However, to explain their 
working, nothing is equal to an example 
based upon a personal experience. Here is 
one which is in no way remarkable, but 
which plainly shows the normal course of 
the operation. 

^1 



The Unknown Guest 

In September, 19 13, while I was at 
Elberfeld, visiting KralPs horses, my wife 

went to consult Mme. M , gave her a 

scrap of writing in my hand — a note dis- 
patched previous to my journey and con- 
taining no allusion to it — and asked her 
where I was and what I was doing. With- 
out a second's hesitation, Mme. M 

declared that I was very far away, In a 
foreign country where they spoke a lan- 
guage which she did not understand. She 
saw first a paved yard, shaded by a big 
tree, with a building on the left and a 
garden at the back: a rough but not inapt 
description of Krall's stables, which my 
wife did not know and which I myself had 
not seen at the time when I wrote the note. 
She next perceived me in the midst of the 
horses, examining them, studying them with 
an absorbed, anxious and tired air. This 
was true, for I found those visits, which 
overwhelmed me with a sense of the marvel- 
68 



The Unknown Guest 

lous and kept my attention on the rack, 
singularly exhausting and bewildering. My 
wife asked her if I intended to buy the 
horses. She replied: 

"Not at all; he is not thinking of it." 

And, seeking her words as though to 
express an unaccustomed and obscure 
thought, she added: 

"I don't know why he is so much in- 
terested; it is not like him. He has no 
particular passion for horses. He has 
some lofty idea which I can't quite dis- 
cover. ..." 

She made two rather curious mistakes in 
this experiment. The first was that, at the 
time when she saw me in Krall's stable- 
yard, I was no longer there. She had re- 
ceived her vision just in the interval of a 
few hours between two visits. Experience 
shows, however, that this is a usual error 
among psychometers. They do not, prop- 
erly speaking, see the action at the very mo- 
69 



The Unknown Guest 

ment of Its performance, but rather the 
customary and familiar action, the princi- 
pal thing that preoccupies either the person 
about whom they are being consulted or the 
person consulting them. They frequently 
go astray in time. There is not, therefore, 
necessarily any simultaneity between the ac- 
tion and the vision; and it is well never to 
take their statements in this respect lit- 
erally. 

The other mistake referred to our dress : 
Krall and I were in ordinary town clothes, 
whereas she saw us in those long coats 
which stable-lads wear when grooming their 
horses. 

Let us now make every allowance for my 
wife's unconscious suggestions: she knew 
that I was at Elberfeld and that I should 
be In the midst of the horses ; and she knew 
or could easily conjecture my state of mind. 
The transmission of thought is remarkable ; 
but this Is a recognized phenomenon and 
70 



The Unknown Guest 

one of frequent occurrence and we need not 
therefore linger over it. 

The real mystery begins with the descrip- 
tion of a place which my wife had never 
seen and which I had not seen either at the 
time of writing the note which established 
the psychometrical communication. Are we 
to beheve that the appearance of what I 
was one day to see was already inscribed on 
that prophetic sheet of paper, or more 
simply and more probably that the paper 
which represented myself was enough to 
transmit either to my wife's subconscious- 
ness or to Mme. M , whom at that 

time I had never met, an exact picture of 
what my eyes beheld three or four hundred 
miles away? But, although this description 
Is exceedingly accurate — paved yard, big 
tree, building on the left, garden at the 
back — is it not too general for all idea of 
chance coincidence to be eliminated? Per- 
haps, by insisting further, greater precision 
71 



The Unknown Guest 

might have been obtained; but this is not 
certain, for as a rule the pictures follow 
upon one another so swiftly in the medium's 
vision that he has no time to perceive the 
details. When all is said, experiences of 
this kind do not enable us to go beyond 
the telepathic explanation. But here is a 
different one, in which subconscious sugges- 
tion cannot play any part whatever. 

Some days after the experiment which 
I have related, I received from England a 
request for my autograph. Unlike most of 
those which assail an author of any celeb- 
rity, it was charming and unaffected; but it 
told me nothing about its writer. Without 
even noticing from what town it was sent 
to me, after showing it to my wife, I re- 
placed it in its envelope and took it to 

Mme. M . She began by describing us, 

my wife and myself, who both of us had 
touched the paper and consequently im- 
pregnated it with our respective "fluids." 
72 



The Unknown Guest 

I asked her to pass beyond us and come to 
the writer of the note. She then saw a 
girl of fifteen or sixteen, almost a child, 
who had been in rather indifferent health, 
but who was now very well indeed. The 
girl was in a beautiful garden, in front of 
a large and luxurious house standing in 
the midst of rather hilly country. She 
was playing with a big, curly-haired, 
long-eared dog. Through the branches 
of the trees one caught a glimpse of the 
sea. 

On enquiry, all the details were found to 
be astonishingly accurate; but, as usual, 
there was a mistake in the time, that is to 
say, the girl and her dog were not in the 
garden at the instant when the medium saw 
them there. Here again an habitual action 
had obscured a casual movement; for, as 
I have already said, the vision very 
rarely corresponds with the momentary 
reality. 

73 



The Unknown Guest 

4 

There is nothing exceptional in the above 
example; I selected it from among many 
others because it is simple and clear. Be- 
sides, this kind of experience is already, so 
to speak, classical, or at least should be so, 
were it not that everything relating to the 
manifestations of our subconsciousness is 
always received with extraordinary sus- 
picion. In any case, I cannot too often re- 
peat that the experiment is within every- 
body's reach; and it rarely fails to achieve 
absolute success with capable psychometers, 
who are pretty well known and whom it is 
open to any one to consult. 

Let us add that it can be extended much 
further. If, for instance, I had acted as I 
did in similar cases and asked the medium 
questions about the young girl's home- 
circle, about the character of her father, the 
health of her mother, the tastes and habits 
of her brothers and sisters, she would have 

74 



The Unknown Guest 

answered with the same certainty, the same 
precision as one might do who was not only 
a close acquaintance of the girl's, but en- 
dowed with much more penetrating facul- 
ties of Intuition than a normal observer. In 
short, she would have felt and expressed all 
that this girl's subconsciousness would have 
felt with regard to the persons mentioned. 
But It must be admitted that, as we are 
here no longer speaking of facts that are 
easily verified, confirmation becomes in- 
finitely more difficult. 

There could be no question. In the cir- 
cumstances, of transmission of thought, 
since both the medium and I were ignorant 
of everything. Besides, other experiments, 
easily devised and repeated and more rigor- 
ously controlled, do away with that theory 
entirely. For instance, I took three letters 
written by intimate friends, put each of 
them in a double envelope and gave them 
to a messenger unacquainted with the con- 
75 



The Unknown Guest 

tents of the envelopes and also with the 
persons In question to take to Mme. 
M . On arriving at the house, the mes- 
senger handed the clairvoyant one of the 
letters, selected at random, and did nothing 
further beyond putting the Indispensable 
questions, likewise at random, and taking 
down the medium's replies In shorthand. 
Mme. M began by giving a very strik- 
ing physical portrait of the lady who had 
written the letter ; followed this up with an 
absolutely faithful description of her char- 
acter, her habits, her tastes, her intellectual 
and moral qualities; and ended by adding 
a few details concerning her private life, 
of which I myself was entirely unaware and 
of which I obtained the confirmation 
shortly afterwards. The experiment 
yielded just as remarkable results when con- 
tinued with the two other letters. 

In the face of this mystery, two explana- 
tions may be offered, both equally perplex- 
76 



The Unknown Guest 

Ing. On the one hand, we shall have to 
admit that the sheet of paper handed to 
the psychometer and impregnated with hu- 
man ''fluid" contains, after the manner of 
some prodigiously compressed gas, all the 
incessantly renewed, incessantly recurring 
images that surround a person, all his past 
and perhaps his future, his psychology, his 
state of health, his wishes, his intentions, 
often unknown to himself, his most secret 
instincts, his likes and dislikes, all that is 
bathed In light and all that Is plunged in 
darkness, his whole life. In short, and more 
than his personal and conscious life, besides 
all the lives and all the Influences, good or 
bad, latent or manifest, of all who approach 
him. We should have here a mystery as 
unfathomable and at least as vast as that of 
generation, which transmits, in an Infinitesi- 
mal particle, the mind and matter, with all 
the qualities and all the faults, all the ac- 
quirements and all the history, of a series 

77 



The Unknown Guest 

of lives of which none can tell the 
number. 

On the other hand, if we do not admit 
that so much energy can lie concealed in a 
sheet of paper, continuing to exist and de- 
velop indeiinitely there, we must necessarily 
suppose that an inconceivable network of 
nameless forces is perpetually radiating 
from this same paper, forces which, cleav- 
ing time and space, detect instantaneously, 
anywhere and at any distance, the life that 
gave them life and place themselves in com- 
plete communication, body and soul, senses 
and thoughts, past and future, conscious- 
ness and subconsciousness, with an existence 
lost amid the innumerous host of men who 
people this earth. It Is, indeed, exactly 
what happens in the experiments with me- 
diums in automatic speech or writing, who 
believe themselves to be inspired by the 
dead. Yet, here it is no longer a discarnate 
spirit, but an object of any kind imbued 
78 



The Unknown Guest 

with a living "fluid" that works the 
miracle; and this, we may remark in pass- 
ing, deals a severe blow to the spiritualistic 
theory. 

Nevertheless, there are two rather seri- 
ous objections to this second explanation. 
Granting that the object really places the 
medium in communication with an unknown 
entity discovered in space, how comes it 
that the image or the spectacle created by 
that communication hardly ever corre- 
sponds with the reality at the actual mo- 
ment ? On the other hand, It Is indisputable 
that the psychometer's clairvoyance, his 
gift of seeing at a distance the pictures and 
scenes surrounding an unknow^n being, Is 
exercised with the same certainty and the 
same power when the object that sets his 
strange faculty at work has been touched by 
a person who has been dead for years. Are 
we, then, to admit that there is an actual, 
living communication with a human being 
79 



The Unknown Guest 

who is no more, who sometimes — as, for 
instance, in a case of incineration — has left 
no trace of himself on earth, in short, with 
a dead man who continues to live at the 
place and at the moment at which he im- 
pregnated the object with his "fluid" and 
who seems to be unaware that he is dead? 
But these objections are perhaps less 
serious than one might believe. To begin 
with, there are seers, so-called "tele- 
psychics," who are not psychometers, that 
is to say, they are able to communicate with 
an unknown and distant person without the 
intermediary of an object; and in these 
seers, as in the psychometers, the vision very 
rarely corresponds with the actual facts of 
the moment: they too perceive above all 
the general impression, the usual and char- 
acteristic actions. Next, as regards com- 
munications with a person long since dead, 
we are confronted with one of two things : 
either confirmation will be almost impos- 
80 



The Unknown Guest 

sible when It concerns revelations on the 
subject of the dead man's private deeds and 
actions, which are unknown to any living 
person; or else communication will be es- 
tablished not with the deceased, but with 
the living person, who necessarily knows 
the facts which he is called upon to confirm. 
As Dr. Osty very rightly says : 

''The conditions are then those of per- 
ception by the intermediary of the thoughts 
of a living person; and the deceased is per- 
ceived through a mental representation. 
The experiment, for this reason, is value- 
less as evidence of the reality of retrospec- 
tive psychometry and consequently of the 
recording part played by the object. 

"The only class of experiment that 
could be of value from this point of view, 
would be that in which confirmation would 
come subsequently from documents whose 
contents remained unknown to any living 
8i 



The Unknown Guest 

person until after the clairvoyance sitting. 
It might then be proved that the object 
can latently register the human personali- 
ties which have touched it and that it is 
sufficient in itself to allow of a mental re- 
construction of those personalities through 
the interpretation of the register by a clair- 
voyant or psychometer." 

5 

It may be imagined that experiments of 
this sort, in which there is no crack, no 
leak on the side of the hving, are anything 
but easy to carry through. In the case of 
a murder, for instance, it can always be 
maintained that the medium discovers the 
body and the circumstances of the tragedy 
through the involuntary and unconscious in- 
termediary' of the murderer, even when the 
latter escapes prosecution and suspicion 
altogether. But a recent incident, related 
by Dr. Osty with the utmost precision of 
82 



The Unknown Guest 

detail and the most scrupulous verification 
In the Annales des sciences psychiques of 
April, 19 14, perhaps supplies us with one 
of those experiments which we have not 
been able to achieve until this day. I give 
the facts in a few words. 

On the 2nd of Mach of this year, M. 
Etienne Lerasle, an old man of eighty-two, 
left his son's house at Cours-les-Barres 
(Cher) for his daily walk and was not 
seen again. The house stands in the middle 
of a forest on Baron Jaubert's estate. Vain 
searches were made in every direction for 
the missing man's traces; the ponds and 
pools were dragged to no purpose ; and on 
the 8th of March a careful and systemati- 
cal exploration of the wood, in which no 
fewer than twenty-four people took part, 
led to no result. At last, on the i8th of 
March, M. Louis Mirault, Baron Jaubert's 
agent, thought of applying to Dr. Osty, 
and supplied him with a scarf which the 
83 



The Unknown Guest 

old man had worn. Dr. Osty went to his 

favourite medium, Mme. M . He 

knew only one thing, that the matter con- 
cerned an old man of eighty-two, who 
walked with a slight stoop; and that was 
all. 

As soon as Mme. M had taken the 

scarf in her hands, she saw the dead body 
of an old man lying on the damp ground, 
in a wood, in the middle of a coppice, be- 
side a horse-shoe pond, near a sort of rock. 
She traced the road taken by the victim, 
depicted the buildings which he had passed, 
his mental condition impaired by age, his 
fixed intention of dying, his physical appear- 
ance, his habitual and characteristic way of 
carrying his stick, his soft striped shirt, 
and so on. 

The accuracy of the description caused 
the greatest astonishment among the miss- 
ing man's friends. There was one detail 
that puzzled them a little : the mention of 
84 



The Unknown Guest 

a rock in a part of the country that pos- 
sessed none. The search was resumed on 
the strength of the data supplied by 
the clairvoyant. But all the roads in 
a forest are more or less alike; the in- 
dications were not enough; and nothing 
was found. 

It so happened that the second and third 

interviews with Mme. M had to be 

postponed until the 30th of March and the 
6th of April following. At each of these 
sittings, the details of the vision and of the 
road taken became clearer and clearer and 
were given with startling precision, so much 
so that, by pursuing step by step the indica- 
tions of the medium, the man's friends 
ended by discovering the body, dressed as 
stated, lying in the middle of a coppice, just 
as described, close to a huge stump of a 
tree all covered with moss, which might 
easily be mistaken for a rock, and on the 
edge of a crescent-shaped piece of water. 
8s 



The Unknown Guest 

I may add that these particular indications 
applied to no other part of the wood. 



I refer the reader to Dr. Osty's conscien- 
tious and exhaustive article for the numer- 
ous details which I have been obliged to 
omit; but those which I have given are 
enough to show the character of this ex- 
traordinary case. To begin with, we have 
one certaint}^ which appears almost unassail- 
able, namely, that there can be no question 
of a crime. No one had the least interest 
in procuring the old man's death. The 
body bore no marks of violence; besides, 
the minds of those concerned did not for a 
moment entertain the thought of an assault. 
The poor man, whose mental derangement 
was known to all those about him, obsessed 
by the desire and thought of death, had 
gone quietly and obstinately to seek it in 
the nearest coppice. There was therefore 
86 



The Unknown Guest 

no criminal in the case, in other words, 
there was no possible or imaginable com- 
munication between the medium's subcon- 
sciousness and that of any living person. 
Hence we are compelled to admit that the 
communication was established with the 
dead man or with his subconsciousness, 
which continued to live for nearly a month 
after his death and to wander around the 
same places; or else we must agree that all 
this coming tragedy, all that the old man 
was about to see, do and suffer was already 
irrevocably contained and inscribed in the 
scarf at the moment when he last wore it. 
In this particular case, considering that 
all relations with the living were definitely 
and undeniably severed, I can see no other 
explanations beyond these two. They are 
both equally astounding and land us sud- 
denly In a world of fable and enchantment 
which we thought that we had left for good 
and all. If we do not adopt the theory 
87 



The Unknown Guest 

of the tell-tale scarf, we must accept that 
of the spiritualists, who maintain that the 
spirits communicate with us freely. It is 
possible that they may find a serious argu- 
ment in this case. But a solitary fact is not 
enough to support a theory, all the more 
so as the one in question will never be abso- 
lutely safe from the objection that could be 
raised if the case were one of murder, which 
Is possible, after all, and cannot be actually 
disproved. We must, therefore, while 
awaiting other similar and more decisive 
facts, if any such are conceivable, return 
to those which are, so to speak, laboratory 
facts, facts which are only denied by those 
who will not take the trouble to verify 
them ; and to Interpret these facts there are 
only the two theories which we mentioned 
above, before this digression; for, in these 
cases, which are unlike those of automatic 
speech or writing, we have not as a rule to 
consider the possibility of any intervention 
88 



The Unknown Guest 

of the dead. As a matter of fact, the best- 
known psychometers are very rarely spir- 
itualists and claim no connection with the 
spirits. They care but little, as a rule, 
about the source of their intuitions and 
seem very little interested in their exact 
workng and origin. Now it would be ex- 
ceedingly surprising if, acting and speaking 
in the name of the departed, they should 
be so consistently ignorant of the existence 
of those who inspire them; and more sur- 
prising still if the dead, whom in other cir- 
cumstances we see so jealously vindicating 
their identity, should not here, when the 
occasion is so propitious, seek to declare 
themselves, to manifest themselves and to 
make themselves known. 

7 

Dismissing for the time being the inter- 
vention of the dead, I believe then that, in 
most of the cases which I will call labora- 

89 



The Unknown Guest 

tory cases, because they can be reproduced 
at will, we are not necessarily reduced to 
the theory of the vitalized object represent- 
ing wholly, indefinitely and inexhaustibly, 
through all the vicissitudes of time and 
space, every one of those who have held 
it in their hands for a little while. For we 
must not forget that, according to this 
theor}^, the object in question will conceal 
and, through the intermediary of the me- 
dium, will reveal as many distinct and com- 
plete personalities as it has undergone 
contacts. It will never confuse or mix those 
different personalities. They will remain 
there in definite strata, distinct one from 
another; and, as Dr. Osty puts it, "the me- 
dium can interpret each of them from be- 
ginning to end, as though he were in 
communication with the far-off entity." 

All this makes the theory somewhat in- 
credible, even though it be not much more 
so than the many other phenomena in which 
90 



The Unknown Guest 

the shock of the miraculous has been soft- 
ened by familiarity. We can find more or 
less everywhere In nature that prodigious 
faculty of storing away Inexhaustible en- 
ergies and Ineffaceable traces, memories and 
Impressions In space. There Is not a thing 
In this world that Is lost, that disappears, 
that ceases to be, to retain and to propagate 
life. Need we recall, In this connection, the 
Incessant emission of pictures perceived by 
the sensitized plate, the vibrations of sound 
that accumulate In the disks of the gramo- 
phone, the Hertzian waves that lose none 
of their strength In space, the mysteries of 
reproduction and, in a word, the incompre- 
hensibility of everything around us? 

8 

Personally, If I had to choose, I should, 
in most of these laboratory cases, frankly 
adopt the theory that the object touched 
serves simply to detect, among the pro- 

91 



The Unknown Guest 

digious crowd of human beings, the one 
who impregnated it with his "fluid." 

"This object," says Dr. Osty, "has no 
other function than to allow the medium's 
sensitiveness to distinguish a definite force 
from among the innumerable forces that 
assail it." 

It seems more and more certain that, as 
the cells of an immense organism, we are 
connected with everything that exists by 
an inextricable network of vibrations, 
waves, influences, of nameless, numberless 
and uninterrupted fluids. Nearly always, 
in nearly all men, everything carried along 
by these invisible wires falls into the depths 
of the unconsciousness and passes unper- 
ceived, which does not mean that it remains 
inactive. But sometimes an exceptional cir- 
cumstance — in the present case, the marvel- 
lous sensibility of a first-class medium — 
92 



The Unknown Guest 

suddenly reveals to us, by the vibrations and 
the undeniable action of one of those wires, 
the existence of the infinite network. I will 
not speak here of trails discovered and fol- 
lowed in an almost mediumistic manner, 
after an object of some sort has been sniffed 
at. Such stories, though highly probable, 
as yet lack adequate support. But, within 
a similar order of ideas, and in a humbler 
world and one with more modest limits, the 
dog, for instance, is incessantly surrounded 
by different scents and smells to which he 
appears indifferent until his attention is 
aroused by one or other of these vagrant 
effluvia, when he extricates it from the 
hopeless tangle. It would seem as though 
the trail took life, vibrating like a chord 
In unison with the animal's wishes, becom- 
ing irresistible, and taking it to its goal 
after innumerable winds and turns. 

We see the mysterious network revealed 
also In *'cross-correspondence." Two or 

93 



The Unknown Guest 

three mediums who do not know one an- 
other, who are often separated by seas or 
continents, who are Ignorant of the where- 
abouts of the one who Is to complete their 
thought, each write a part of a sentence 
which, as It stands, conveys no meaning 
whatever. On piecing the fragments to- 
gether, we perceive that they fit to perfec- 
tion and acquire an Intelligible and ob- 
viously premeditated sense. We here find 
once more the same faculty that permits the 
medium to detect, among thousands of 
others, a definite force which was wander- 
ing in space. It Is true that, In these cases, 
the spiritualists maintain that the whole ex- 
periment is organized and directed by a 
discarnate Intelligence, Independent of the 
mediums, which means to prove Its existence 
and its identity in this manner. Without 
incontinently rejecting this theory, which Is 
not necessarily Indefensible, we will merely 
remark that, since the faculty is manifested 
94 



The Unknown Guest 

In psychometry without the Intervention of 
the spirits, there can be no sufficient reason 
for attributing It to them In cross-corre- 
spondence. 

9 

But In whom does it reside? Is It hid- 
den In ourselves or in the medium? Ac- 
cording to Dr. Osty, the clairvoyants are 
mirrors reflecting the intuitive thought that 
is latent in each of us. In other words, it 
is we ourselves who are clairvoyant, and 
they but reveal to us our own clairvoyance. 
Their mission is to stir, to awaken, to gal- 
vanize, to illumine the secrets of our sub- 
consciousness and to bring them to the sur- 
face of our normal lives. They act upon 
our inner darkness exactly as, in the photo- 
graphic dark-room, the developlng-bath 
acts upon the sensitized plate. I am con- 
vinced that the theory is accurate as re- 
gards Intuition and clairvoyance proper, 
95 



The Unknown Guest 

that is to say, in all cases where we are in 
the medium's presence and more or less 
directly in touch with him. But is it so in 
psychometry? Is it we who, unknown to 
ourselves, know all that the object contains, 
or is it the medium alone who discovers 
it in the object itself, independently of the 
person who produces the object? When, 
for instance, we receive a letter from a 
stranger, does this letter, which has ab- 
sorbed like a sponge the whole life and by 
choice the subconscious life of the writer, 
disgorge all that it contained into our sub- 
consciousness ? Do we instantly learn all 
that concerns its author, absolutely as 
though he were standing before us in the 
flesh and, above all, with his soul laid bare, 
though w^e remain profoundly ignorant of 
the fact that we have learnt it until the 
medium's intervention tells us so? 

This, if you like, is simply shifting the 
question. Let it be the medium or myself 
96 



The Unknown Guest 

that discovers the unknown personality in 
the object or tracks it across time and 
space : all that we do is to widen the scope 
of our riddle, while leaving it no less ob- 
scure. Nevertheless, there is some interest 
in knowing whether we have to do with a 
general faculty latent in all men or an in- 
explicable privilege reserved to rare in- 
dividuals. The exceptional should always 
be eliminated, if possible, and not left to 
hang over the abyss like an unfinished 
bridge leading to nothing. I am well aware 
that the compulsory intervention of the me- 
dium implies that, in spite of all, we recog- 
nize his possession of abnormal faculties; 
but at any rate we reduce their power and 
their extent appreciably and we return 
sooner and more easily to the ordinary 
laws of the great human mystery. And it 
is of importance that we should be ever 
coming back to that mystery and ever bring- 
ing all things back to it. But, unfortun- 

97 



The Unknown Guest 

ately, actual experience does not admit of 
this generalization. It is clearly a case of 
a special faculty, one peculiar to the me^ 
dium, one which is wholly unknown to our 
latent intuition. We can easily assure our- 
selves of this by causing the medium to re- 
ceive through a third party and enclosed 
in a series of three envelopes, as in the ex- 
periment described above, a letter of which 
we know the writer, but of which both the 
source and the contents are absolutely un- 
known to the messenger. These unusual 
circumstances, in which all subconscious 
communications between consultant and 
consulted are strictly cut off, will in no way 
hamper the medium's clairvoyance ; and we 
may fairly conclude that it is actually the 
medium himself who discovers directly, 
without an intermediary, without "relays," 
to use M. DuchatePs expression, all that 
the object holds concealed. It, therefore, 
seems certain that there is, at least in psy- 
98 



The Unknown Guest 

chometry, something more than the mere 
mirror of which Dr. Osty speaks. 

lO 

I consider It necessary to declare for the 
last time that these psychometric phenom- 
ena, astonishing though they appear at first, 
are known, proved and certain and are no 
longer denied or doubted by any of those 
who have studied them seriously. I could 
have given full particulars of a large 
number of conclusive experiments; but this 
seemed to me as superfluous and tedious 
as would be, for Instance, a string of names 
of the recognized chemical reactions that 
can be obtained in a laboratory. Any one 
who pleases Is at liberty to convince him- 
self of the reality of the facts, provided that 
he applies to genuine mediums and keeps 
aloof from the inferior "seers" and espe- 
cially the shams and imposters who swarm 
In this region more than in any other. 
99 



The Unknown Guest 

Even with the best of them, he will have 
to be careful of the involuntary, uncon- 
scious and almost inevitable interference 
of telepathy, which is also very interesting, 
though it is a phenomenon of a different 
class, much less surprising and debatable 
than pure psychometry. He must also learn 
the art of interrogating the medium and 
refrain from asking incoherent and random 
questions about casual or future events. He 
will not forget that "clairvoyance is strictly 
limited to the perception of human person- 
ality," according to the rule so well formu- 
lated by Dr. Osty. Experiments have been 
made in which a psychometer, on touching 
the tooth of a prehistoric animal, saw the 
landscapes and the cataclysms of the 
earth's earliest ages displayed before his 
eyes ; In which another medium, on handling 
a jewel, conjured up, it would seem with 
marvellous exactness, the games and pro- 
cessions of ancient Greece, as though the 



The Unknown Guest 

objects permanently retained the recoUec 
tlon or rediscovered the "astral negatives' 
of all the events which they once witnessed 
But It will be understood that, In such cases 
any effective control Is, so to speak, Impos 
sible and that the part played by telepathy 
cannot be decided. It is Important, there- 
fore, to keep strictly to that which can be 
verified. 

Even when thus limiting his scope, the 
experimenter will meet with many surprises. 
For instance, though the revelations of two 
psychometers to whom the same letter is 
handed in succession most often agree re- 
markably in their main outlines, it can also 
happen that one of them perceives only 
what concerns the writer of the letter, 
whereas the other will be interested only 
in the person to whom the letter was ad- 
dressed or to a third person who was in 
the room where the letter was written. It 
is well to be forearmed against these first 



The Unknown Guest 

mistakes, which, for that matter, In the fre- 
quent cases where strict control is possible, 
but confirm the existence and the indepen- 
dence of the astounding faculty. 

II 

As for the theories that attempt to ex- 
plain it, I am quite willing to grant that 
they are still somewhat confused. The Im- 
portant thing for the moment is the accumu- 
lation of cases and experiments that go feel- 
ing their way farther and farther along all 
the paths of the unknown. Meanwhile, 
than one unexpected door which sheds 
at the back of our old convictions more 
than one unexpected door, which sheds 
upon the life and habits of our secret be- 
ing sufficient light to puzzle us for many 
a long day. This brings us back once more 
to the omniscience and perhaps the omni- 
potence of our hidden guest, to the brink 
of the mysterious reservoir of every manner 

102 



The Unknown Guest 

of knowledge which we shall meet with 
again when we come to speak of the future, 
of the talking horses, of the divining-rod, 
of materializations and miracles, in short, 
in every circumstance where we pass beyond 
the horizon of our little daily life. As we 
thus advance, with slow and cautious foot- 
steps, in these as yet deserted and very 
nebulous regions of metapsychics, we are 
compelled to recognize that there must 
exist somewhere, in this world or in others, 
a spot in which everything is known. In 
which everything is possible, to which every- 
thing goes, from which everything comes, 
which belongs to all, to which all have 
access, but of which the long-forgotten 
roads must be learnt again by our stumbling 
feet. We shall often meet those difficult 
roads in the course of our present quest 
and we shall have more than one occasion 
to refer again to those depths into which all 
the supernatural facts of our existence 
103 



The Unknown Guest 

flow, unless indeed they take their source 
there. For the moment, that which must 
above all engage our attention in these psy- 
chometric phenomena is their purely and 
exclusively human character. They occur 
between the living and the living, on this 
solid earth of ours, in the world that lies 
before our eyes; and the spirits, the dead, 
the gods and the interplanetary intelligences 
know them not. Hardly anywhere else, 
except in the equally perplexing manifesta- 
tions of the divining-rod and in certain ma- 
terializations, shall we find with the same 
clearness this same specific character, if one 
may call it so. This is a valuable lesson. 
It tells us that our every-day life provides 
phenomena as disturbing and of exactly the 
same kind and nature as those which, in 
other circumstances, we attribute to other 
forces than ours. It teaches us also that 
we must first direct and exhaust our en- 
quiries here below, among ourselves, before 
104 



The Unknown Guest 

passing to the other side ; for our first care 
should be to simplify the interpretations 
and explanations and not to seek elsewhere, 
in suppositions, what probably lies hidden 
within us in reality. Afterwards, If the un- 
known overwhelm us utterly, if the dark- 
ness engulf us beyond all hope, there will 
still be time to go, none can tell where, to 
question the deities or the dead. 



105 



CHAPTER III 



THE KNOWLEDGE OF THE 
FUTURE 



CHAPTER III 

THE KNOWLEDGE OF THE FUTURE 
I 

PREMONITION or precognition leads 
us to still more mysterious regions, 
where stands, half-emerging from an intol- 
erable darkness, the gravest problem that 
can thrill mankind, the knowledge of the 
future. The latest, the best and the most 
complete study devoted to it is, I believe, 
that recently published by M. Ernest Boz- 
zano, under the title Des Phenomenes Pre- 
monitoires. Availing himself of excellent 
earlier work, notably that of Mrs. Sidgwick 
and Myers^ and adding the result of his 
own researches, the author collects some 
thousand cases of precognition, of which he 
discusses one hundred and sixty, leaving the 

^Proceedings, Vols. V. and XI. 
109 



The Unknown Guest 

great majority of the others on one side, 
not because they are negligible, but be- 
cause he does not wish to exceed too fla- 
grantly the normal limits of a monograph. 

He begins by carefully eliminating all 
the episodes which, though apparently pre- 
monitory, may be explained by self-sugges- 
tion (as in the case, for instance, where 
some one smitten with a disease still latent 
seems to foresee this disease and the death 
which will be its conclusion), by telepathy 
(when a sensitive is aware beforehand of 
the arrival of a person or a letter) , or lastly 
by clairvoyance (when a man dreams of a 
spot where he will find something which 
he has mislaid, or an uncommon plant, or 
an insect sought for in vain, or of the un- 
known place which he will visit at some 
later date). 

In all these cases, we have not, properly 
speaking, to do with a pure future, but 
rather with a present that is not yet known, 
no 



The Unknown Guest 

Thus reduced and stripped of all foreign 
influences and intrusions, the number of 
instances in which there is a really 
clear and incontestable perception of a 
fragment of the future remains large 
enough, contrary to what is generally 
believed, to make it impossible for us 
to speak of extraordinary accidents or 
wonderful coincidences. There must be 
a limit to everything, even to distrust, 
even to the most extensive incredulity, 
otherwise all historical research and a 
good deal of scientific research would be- 
come decidedly impracticable. And this re- 
mark applies as much to the nature of the 
incidents related as to the actual authen- 
ticity of the narratives. We can contest or 
suspect any story whatever, any written 
proof, any evidence; but thenceforward we 
must abandon all certainty or knowledge 
that is not acquired by means of mathe- 
matical operations or laboratory experi- 
III 



The Unknown Guest 

ments, that is to say, three-fourths of the 
human phenomena which interest us 
most. Observe that the records collected 
by the investigators of the S. P. R., 
like those discussed by M. Bozzano, 
are all told at first hand and that 
those stories of which the narrators were 
not the protagonists or the direct witnesses 
have been ruthlessly rejected. Further- 
more, some of these narratives are neces- 
sarily of the nature of medical observations; 
as for the others, if we attentively exam- 
ine the character of those who have re- 
lated them and the circumstances which 
corroborate them, we shall agree that it is 
more just and more reasonable to believe 
in them than to look upon every man who 
has an extraordinary experience as being a 
priori a liar, the victim of an hallucina- 
tion, or a wag. 

2 

There could be no question of giving 



The Unknown Guest 

here even a brief analysis of the most strik- 
ing cases. It would require a hundred 
pages and would alter the whole nature of 
this essay, which, to keep within its proper 
dimensions, must take it for granted that 
most of the materials which it examines 
are familiar. I therefore refer the reader 
who may wish to form an opinion for him- 
self to the easily-accessible sources which I 
have mentioned above. It will suffice, to 
give an accurate idea of the gravity of the 
problem to any one who has not time or 
opportunity to consult the original docu- 
ments if I sum up in a few words some of 
these pioneer adventures, selected among 
those which seem least open to dispute ; for 
it goes Vv^ithout saying that all have not the 
same value, otherwise the question would be 
settled. There are some which, while ex- 
ceedingly striking at first sight and offer- 
ing every guarantee that could be desired 
as to authenticity, nevertheless do not imply 
11.^ 



The Unknown Guest 

a real knowledge of the future and can be 
interpreted in another manner. I give one, 
to serve as an instance ; it is reported by Dr. 
Alphonse Teste in his Manuel pratique du 
magnetisme animal. 

On the 8th of May, Dr. Teste mag- 
netizes Mme. Hortense in the 

presence of her husband. She is no sooner 
asleep than she announces that she has been 
pregnant for a fortnight, that she will not 
go her full time, that "she will take fright 
at something," that she will have a fall and 
that the result will be a miscarriage. She 
adds that, on the 12th of May, after hav- 
ing had a fright, she will have a fainting-fit 
which will last for eight minutes; and she 
then describes, hour by hour, the course of 
her malady, which will end in three days' 
loss of reason, from which she will recover. 

On awaking, she retains no recollection 
of anything that has passed; it is kept from 
her; and Dr. Teste communicates his notes 
114 



The Unknown Guest 

to Dr. Amedee Latour. On the 12th of 

May, he calls on M. and Mme. , 

finds them at table and puts Mme. 

to sleep again, whereupon she 

repeats word for word what she told him 
four days before. They wake her up. The 
dangerous hour Is drawing near. They 
take every Imaginable precaution and even 

close the shutters. Mme. , made 

uneasy by these extraordinary measures 
which she Is quite unable to understand, 
asks what they are going to do to her. 
Half-past three o'clock strikes. Mme. 

rises from the sofa on which they 

have made her sit and wants to leave the 
room. The doctor and her husband try to 
prevent her. 

"But what Is the matter with you?" she 
asks. "I simply must go out." 

"No, madame, you shall not : I speak In 
the interest of your health." 

"Well, then, doctor," she replies, with 
"5 



The Unknown Guest 

a smile, "if it is in the interest of my health, 
that is all the more reason why you should 
let me go out." 

The excuse is a plausible one and even 
irresistible; but the husband, wishing to 
carry the struggle against destiny to the 
last, declares that he will accompany his 
wife. The doctor remains alone, feeling 
somewhat anxious, in spite of the rather 
farcical turn which the incident has taken. 
Suddenly, a piercing shriek is heard and the 
noise of a body falling. He runs out and 

finds Mme. wild with fright and 

apparently dying In her husband's arms. At 
the moment when, leaving him for an in- 
stant, she opened the door of the place 
where she was going, a rat, the first seen 
there for twenty years, rushed at her and 
gave her so great a start that she fell flat 
on her back. And all the rest of the pre- 
diction was fulfilled to the letter, hour by 
hour and detail by detail. 
ii6 



The Unknown Guest 

3 
To make It quite clear in what spirit I 

am undertaking this study and to remove 
at the beginning any suspicion of blind or 
systematic credulity, I am anxious, before 
going any further, to say that I fully realize 
that cases of this kind by no means carry 
conviction. It is quite possible that every- 
thing happened in the subconscious imagi- 
nation of the subject and that she herself 
created, by self-suggestion, her illness, her 
fright, her fall and her miscarriage and 
adapted herself to most of the circum- 
stances which she had foretold In her sec- 
ondary state. The appearance of the rat 
at the fatal moment is the only thing that 
would suggest a precise and disquieting 
vision of an inevitable future event. Unfor- 
tunately, we are not told that the rat was 
perceived by other witnesses than the pa- 
tient, so that there is nothing to prove that 
it also was not imaginary. I have there- 
117 



The Unknown Guest 

fore quoted this inadequate instance only 
because It represents fairly well the general 
aspect and the indecisive value of many 
similar cases and enables us to note once 
and for all the objections which can be 
raised and the precautions which we should 
take before entering these suspicious and 
obscure regions. 

We now come to an infinitely more sig- 
nificant and less questionable case related 
by Dr. Joseph Maxwell, the learned and 
very scrupulous author of Les Phenomenes 
psychiques, a work which has been trans- 
lated into English under the title of Meta- 
psychical Phenomena. It concerns a vision 
which was described to him eight days be- 
fore the event and which he told to many 
people before it was accomplished. A 
sensitive perceived in a crystal the follow- 
ing scene : a large steamer, flying a flag of 
three horizontal bars, black, white and red, 
and bearing the name Leutschland, was 
ii8 



The Unknown Guest 

sailing in mid-ocean. The boat was sud- 
denly enveloped in smoke; a great number 
of sailors, passengers and men in uniform 
rushed to the upper deck ; and the boat went 
down. 

Eight days afterwards, the newspapers 
announced the accident to the Deutschland, 
whose boiler had burst, obliging the steam- 
boat to stand to. 

The evidence of a man like Dr. Max- 
well, especially when we have to do with a 
so-to-speak personal incident, possesses an 
importance on which it is needless to insist. 
We have here, therefore, several days be- 
forehand, the very clear prevision of an 
event which, moreover, in no way concerns 
the percipient: a curious detail, but one 
which is not uncommon in these cases. 
The mistake in reading Leutschland for 
Deutschland, which would have been quite 
natural In real life, adds a note of probabil- 
ity and authenticity to the phenomenon. 
119 



The Unknown Guest 

As for the final act, the foundering of the 
vessel in the place of a simple heaving to, 
we must see in this, as Dr. J. W. Pickering 
and W. A. Sadgrove suggest, "the sub- 
conscious dramatization of a subliminal in- 
ference of the percipient." Such drama- 
tizations, moreover, are instinctive and al- 
most general in this class of visions. 

If this were an isolated case, it would 
certainly not be right to attach decisive im- 
portance to it; "but," Dr. Maxwell ob- 
serves, "the same sensitive has given me 
other curious instances; and these cases, 
compared with others which I myself have 
observed or with those of which I have re- 
ceived first-hand accounts, render the 
hypothesis of coincidence very improbable, 
though they do not absolutely exclude it."^ 

4 
Another and perhaps more convincing 
case, more strictly investigated and estab- 

-Maxwell: Metapsychical Phenomena, p. 202. 
120 



The Unknown Guest 

llshed, a case which clearly does not admit 
of explanation, by the theory of coincidence, 
worthy of all respect though this theory be, 
is that related by M. Theodore Flournoy, 
science professor at the university of 
Geneva, in his remarkable work, Esprits et 
Mediums, Professor Flournoy is known 
to be one of the most learned and most 
critical exponents of the new science of 
metapsychics. He even carries his fond- 
ness for natural explanations and his re- 
pugnance to admit the intervention of su- 
perhuman powers to a point where it is 
often difficult to follow him. I will give 
the narrative as briefly as possible. It will 
be found in full on pp. 348 to 362 of his 
masterly book. 

In August, 1883, a certain Mme. 
Buscarlet, whom he knew personally, re- 
turned to Geneva after spending three 
years with the Moratief family at Kazan 
as governess to two girls. She continued 
121 



The Unknown Guest 

to correspond with the family and also with 
a Mme. Nitchinof, who kept a school at 
Kazan to which Miles. Moratief, Mme. 
Buscarlet's former pupils, went after her 
departure. 

On the night of the 9th of December 
(O. S.) of the same year, Mme. Buscarlet 
had a dream which she described the fol- 
lowing morning in a letter to Mme. Mora- 
tief, dated 10 December. She wrote, to 
quote her own words : 

"You and I were on a country-road when 
a carriage passed in front of us and a voice 
from inside called to us. When we came 
up to the carriage, we saw Mile. Olga 
Popoi lying across it, clothed in white, 
wearing a bonnet trimmed with yellow rib- 
bons. She said to you : 

*' *I called you to tell you that Mme. 
Nitchinof will leave the school on the 
17th.' 

"The carriage then drove on." 



The Unknown Guest 

A week later and three days before the 
letter reached Kazan, the event foreseen In 
the dream was fulfilled In a tragic fashion. 
Mme. NItchlnof died on the i6th of an 
infectious disease; and on the 17th her 
body was carried out of the school for fear 
of Infection. 

It Is well to add that both Mme. Buscar- 
let's letter and the replies which came from 
Russia were communicated to Professor 
Flournoy and bear the postmark dates. 

Such premonitory dreams are frequent; 
but It does not often happen that circum- 
stances and especially the existence of a 
document dated previous to their fulfilment 
give them such Incontestable authenticity. 

We may remark In passing the odd char- 
acter of this premonition, which however 
Is fully in accordance with the habits of our 
unknown guest. The date is fixed pre- 
cisely; but only a veiled and mysterious al- 
lusion (the woman lying across the carriage 
123 



The Unknown Guest 

and cloaked in white) is made to the essen- 
tial part of the prediction, the illness and 
death. 

Was there a coincidence, a vision of the 
future pure and simple, or a vision of the 
future suggested by telepathic influence? 
The theor}' of coincidence can be defended, 
if need be, here as ever^^where else, but 
would be very extraordinary in this case. 
As for telepathic influence, we should have 
to suppose that, on the 9th of December, 
a week before her death, Mme. Nitchinof 
had in her subconsciousness a presentiment 
of her end and that she transmitted this pre- 
sentiment across some thousands of miles, 
from Kazan to Geneva, to a person with 
whom she had never been intimate. It is 
very complex, but possible, for telepathy 
often has these disconcerting ways. If this 
were so, the case which would be one of 
latent illness or even of self-suggestion; 
and the preexistence of the future, without 
124 



The Unknown Guest 

being entirely disproved, would be less 
clearly established. 

5 

Let us pass to other examples. I quote 
from an excellent article on the importance 
of precognitions, by Messrs. Pickering and 
Sadgrove, which appeared in the Annales 
des sciences psychiques for i February 
1908, the summary of an experiment by 
Mrs. A. W. Verrall told in full detail in 
Vol. XX of the Proceedings. Mrs. Ver- 
rall is a celebrated ''automatlst" ; and her 
"cross-correspondences'' occupy a whole 
volume of the Proceedings. Her good 
faith, her sincerity, her fairness and her sci- 
entific precision are above suspicion; and 
she is one of the most active and respected 
members of the Society for Psychical 
Research. 

On the nth of May, 1901, at 11. 10 
P.M., Mrs. Varrall wrote as follows : 
125 



The Unknown Guest 

"Do not hurry date this hoc est 
quod volul — tandem. dmaioGvyq fcai xapd 
(fv/x(pGov6t avverotffiv. A. W. V. Kai clWqd 
rivi iGGDi. calx pedibus Inhaerens difficulta- 
tem superavit. magnopere adiuvas per- 
sectando semper. Nomen inscribere iam 
possum — sic, en tibi!"^ 

After the writing comes a humorous 
drawing representing a bird walking. 

That same night, as there were said to be 
"uncanny happenings" in some rooms near 
the London Law Courts, the watchers ar- 
ranged to sit through the night in the empty 
rooms. Precautions were taken to prevent 
intrusion and powdered chalk was spread 
on the floor of the two smaller rooms, "to 

^Xenoglossy is well known not to be unusual in 
automatic writing; sometimes even the "autoraatist"' 
speaks or writes languages of which he is completely 
ignorant. The Latin and Greek passages are trans- 
lated as follows: 

"This is what I have wanted, at last. Justice and 
joy speak a word to the wise. A. W. V. and perhaps 
some one else. Chalk sticking to the feet has got 
over the difncultj-. You help greatly by always per- 
severing. Now I can write a name — thus, here it is!" 

126 



The Unknown Guest 

trace anybody or anything that might come 
or go." Mrs. Verrall knew nothing of the 
matter. The phenomena began at 12.43 
A.M. and ended at 2.9 a.m. The watchers 
noticed marks on the powdered chalk. On 
examination it was seen that the marks were 
"clearly defined bird's footprints in the 
middle of the floor, three in the left-hand 
room and Rve m the right-hand room." 
The marks were Identical and exactly 2j4 
Inches in width; they might be compared 
to the footprints of a bird about the size 
of a turkey. The footprints were observed 
at 2.30 A. M. ; the unexplained phenomena 
had begun at 12.43 ^^^^ same morning. 
The words about "chalk sticking to the 
feet" are a singularly appropriate comment 
on the events; but the remarkable point is 
that Mrs. Verrall wrote what we have said 
one hour and thirty-three minutes before 
the events took place. 

The persons who watched in the two 
127 



The Unknown Guest 

rooms were questioned by Mr. J. G. Pid- 

dington, a member of the council of the 
S. P. R., and declared that they had not 
any expectation of what they discovered. 

I need hardly add that Mrs. Verrall had 
never heard anything about the happenings 
in the haunted house and that the watchers 
were completely ignorant of Mrs. VerralFs 
existence. 

Here then is a very curious prediction 
of an event, insignificant in itself, which is 
to happen, in a house unknown to the one 
who foretells it, to people whom she does 
not know either. The spiritualists, who 
score in this case, not without some reason, 
will have it that a spirit, in order to 
prove its existence and its intelligence, 
organized this httle scene in which the fu- 
ture, the present and the past are all mixed 
up together. Are they right? Or is Mrs. 
Verrairs subconsciousness roaming like 
this, at random, in the future ? It is certain 
128 



The Unknown Guest 

that the problem has seldom appeared un- 
der a more baffling aspect. 



We will now take another premonitory 
dream, strictly controlled by the committee 
of the S. P. R/ Early in September, 1893, 
Annette, wife of Walter Jones, tobacconist, 
of Old Gravel Lane, East London, had her 
little boy ill. One night she dreamt that 
she saw a cart drive up and stop near where 
she was. It contained three coffins, "two 
white and one blue. One white coffin was 
bigger than the other ; and the blue was the 
biggest of the three." The driver took out 
the bigger white coffin and left it at the 
mother's feet, driving off with the others. 
Mrs. Jones told her dream to her husband 
and to a neighbour, laying particular stress 
on the curious circumstance that one of the 
coffins was blue. 

'^Proceedings, vol. xi,, p. 493. 
129 



The Unknown Guest 

On the loth of September, a friend of 
Mr. and Mrs. Jones was confined of a boy, 
who died on the 29th of the same month. 
Their own little boy died on the following 
Monday, the 2nd of October, being then 
sixteen months old. It was decided to bury 
the two children on the same day. On the 
morning of the day chosen, the parish priest 
informed Mr. and Mrs. Jones that another 
child had died in the neighbourhood and 
that its body would be brought into church 
along with the two others. Mrs. Jones re- 
marked to her husband : 

''If the coffin is blue, then my dream will 
come true. For the two other coffins were 
white." 

The third coffin was brought; it was 
blue. It remains to be observed that the 
dimensions of the coffins corresponded ex- 
actly with the dream premonitions, the 
smallest being that of the child who died 
first, the next that of the little Jones boy, 
130 



The Unknown Guest 

who was sixteen months old, and the 
largest, the blue one, that of a boy six years 
of age. 

Let us take, more or less at random, an- 
other case from the inexhaustible Proceed- 
ings^ The report is written by Mr. Al- 
fred Cooper and attested by the Duchess of 
Hamilton, the Duke of Manchester and an- 
other gentleman to whom the duchess re- 
lated the incident before the fulfilment of 
the prophetic vision : 

"A fortnight before the death of the late 

Earl of L ," says Mr. Cooper, "in 

1882, I called upon the Duke of Hamilton, 
in Hill Street, to see him professionally. 
After I had finished seeing him, we went 
into the drawing-room, where the duchess 
was, and the duke said to me : 

** *0h, Cooper, how is the earl ?* 

"The duchess said, What earl?' and, on 

^Proceedings, vol. xi., p. 505. 
131 



The Unknown Guest 

my answering. 'Lord L ^,' she re- 
plied: 

" *That is ven- odd. I have had a most 
extraordinary vision. I went to bed, but, 
af:er being in bed a short time, I was not 
exacdy asleep, bur thought I saw a scene 
as if from a play before me. The actors 

in it were Lord L , in a chair, as if 

in a fit, with a man standing orer him with 
a red beard. He was by the side of a bath, 
over which bath a red lamp was distinctly 
shown.' 

"I then said: 

" T am attending Lord L at 

present; there is very Uttle the matter with 
him; he is not going to die: he will be all 
right very soon.' 

"Well, he got better for a week and was 
nearly well, but, at the end of six or seven 
days after this, I was called to see him sud- 
denly. He had inflammation of both lungs. 

*'I called in Sir William Jenner, but in 
132 



The Unknown Guest 

six days he was a dead man. There were 
two male nurses attending on him ; one had 
been taken ill. But, when I saw the other, 
the dream of the duchess was exactly rep- 
resented. He was standing near a bath 
over the earl and, strange to say, his beard 
was red. There was the bath with the red 
lamp over it; and this brought the story 
to my mind. 

"The vision seen by the duchess was told 
two weeks before the death of Lord 
L . It is a most remarkable thing." 

7 

But it is impossible to find space for the 
many instances related. As I have said, 
there are hundreds of them, making their 
tracks in every direction across the plains 
of the future. Those which I have quoted 
give a sufficient idea of the predominating 
tone and the general aspect of this sort of 
story. It is nevertheless right to add that 
133 



The Unknown Guest 

many of them are not at all tragic and that 
premonition opens its mysterious and ca- 
pricious vistas of the future in connection 
with the most diverse and insignificant 
events. It cares but little for the human 
value of the occurrence and puts the vision 
of a number in a lottery on the same plane 
as the most dramatic death. The roads 
by which it reaches us are also unexpected 
and varied. Often, as in the examples 
quoted, it comes to us in a dream. Some- 
times, it is an auditory or visual hallucina- 
tion which seizes upon us while awake; 
sometimes, an indefinable but clear and ir- 
resistible presentiment, a shapeless but pow- 
erful obsession, an absurd but imperative 
certainty which rises from the depths of our 
inner darkness, where perhaps lies hidden 
the final answer to every riddle. 

One might illustrate each of these mani- 
festations with numerous examples. I will 
mention only a few, selected not among the 
134 



The Unknown Guest 

most striking or the most attractive, but 
among those which have been most strictly 
tested and investigated/ A young peasant 
from the neighbourhood of Ghent, two 
months before the drawing for the con- 
scription, announces to all and sundry that 
he will draw number 90 from the urn. On 
entering the presence of the district-com- 
missioner in charge, he asks If number 90 
IS still in. The answer is yes. 
"Well, then, I shall have It!" 
And, to the general amazement, he 
does draw number 90. 

Questioned as to the manner In which he 
acquired this strange certainty, he declares 
that, two months ago, just after he had 
gone to bed, he saw a huge, indescribable 
form appear in a corner of his room, with 
the number 90 standing out plainly in the 
middle. In figures the size of a man's hand. 
He sat up In bed and shut and opened his 

"^Proceedings, vol. xi., p. 545. 
135 



The Unknown Guest 

eyes to persuade himself that he was not 
dreaming. The apparition remained in the 
same place, distinctly and undeniably. 

Professor Georges Hulin, of the uni- 
versity of Ghent, and M. Jules van 
Dooren, the district-commissioner, who re- 
port the incident, mention three other simi- 
lar and equally striking cases witnessed by 
M. van Dooren during his term of office. 
I am the less inclined to doubt their decla- 
ration inasmuch as I am personally ac- 
quainted with them and know that their 
statements, as regards the objective reality 
of the facts, are so to speak equivalent to 
a legal deposition. M. Bozzano mentions 
some previsions which are quite as remark- 
able In connection with the gaming-tables 
at Monte Carlo. 

I repeat, I am aware that, in the case of 

these occurrences and those which resemble 

them, it is possible once again to invoke the 

theory of coincidence. It will be contended 

136 



The Unknown Guest 

that there are probably a thousand predic- 
tions of this kind which are never talked 
about, because they were not fulfilled, 
whereas, if one of them is accomplished, 
which is bound by the law of probabilities 
to happen some day or other, the astonish- 
ment is general and free rein is given to the 
imagination. This is true; nevertheless, it 
is well to enquire whether these predictions 
are as frequent as is loosely stated. In the 
matter of those which concern the con- 
scription-drawings, for instance, I have had 
the opportunity of interrogating more than 
one constant witness of these little dramas 
of fate; and all admitted that, on the whole, 
they are much rarer than one would be- 
lieve. Next, we must not forget that there 
can be no question here of scientific proofs. 
We are in the midst of a slippery and 
nebulous region, where we would not dare 
to risk a step if we were not allowing our- 
selves to be guided by our feelings rather 
137 



The Unknown Guest 

than by certainties which we are not for- 
bidden to hope for, but which are not yet 
in sight. 

8 

We will abridge our subject still further, 
referring readers who wish to know the de- 
tails to the originals, lest we should never 

have done; or rather, instead of attempt- 
ing an abridgment, which would still be 
too long, so plentiful are the materials, we 
will content ourselves with enumerating a 
few instances, all taken from Bozzano's 
Des Pheno?fienes premonitoires. We read 
there of a funeral procession seen on a high- 
road several days before it actually passed 
that way; or, again, of a young mechanic 
who, in the beginning of November, 
dreamt that he came home at half-past five 
in the afternoon and saw his sister's little 
girl run over by a tram-car while crossing 
the street in front of the house. He told 
138 



The Unknown Guest 

his dream, in great distress; and, on the 
13th of the same month, in spite of all the 
precautions that had been taken, the child 
was run over by the tram-car and killed at 
the hour named. We find the ghost, the 
phantom animal or the mysterious noise 
which, in certain families, is the traditional 
herald of a death or of an imminent catas- 
trophe. We find the celebrated vision which 
the painter Segantini had thirteen days be- 
fore his decease, every detail of which re- 
mained in his mind and was represented in 
his last picture. Death. We find the Mes- 
sina disaster clearly foreseen, twice over, by 
a little girl who perished under the ruins 
of the ill-fated city; and we read of a dream 
which, three months before the French in- 
vasion of Russia, foretold to Countess 
Toutschkoff that her husband would fall 
at Borodino, a village so little known at 
the time that those interested in the dream 
looked in vain for its name on the maps. 
139 



The Unknown Guest 

Until now we have spoken only of the 
spontaneous manifestations of the future. 
It would seem as though coming events, 
gathered in front of our lives, bear with 
crushing weight upon the uncertain and de- 
ceptive dike of the present, which is no 
longer able to contain them. They ooze 
through, they seek a crevice by which to 
reach us. But, side by side with these 
passive, independent and intractable premo- 
nitions, which are but so many vagrant and 
furtive emanations of the unknown, are 
others which do yield to entreaty, allow 
themselves to be directed into channels, are 
more or less obedient to our orders and will 
sometimes reply to the questions which we 
put to them. They come from the same in- 
accessible reservoir, are no less mysterious, 
but yet appear a little more human than 
the others ; and, without drugging ourselves 
with puerile or dangerous illusions, we may 
be permitted to hope that, if we follow 
140 



The Unknown Guest 

them and study them attentively, they will 
one day open to us the hidden paths that 
join that which is no more to that which is 
not yet. 

It is true that here, where we must needs 
mix with the somewhat lawless world of 
professional mystery-mongers, we have to 
increase our caution and walk with meas- 
ured steps on very suspicious ground. But 
even in this region of pitfalls we glean a cer- 
tain number of facts that cannot reason- 
ably be contested. It will be enough to 
recall, for instance, the symbolic premoni- 
tions of the famous "seeress of Prevorst," 
Frau Hauffe, whose prophetic spirit was 
awakened by soap-bubbles, crystals and mir- 
rors;* the clairvoyant who, eighteen years 
before the event, foretold the death of a 
girl by the hand of her rival in 1907, in a 
written prophecy which was presented to 
the court by the mother of the murdered 

lA. J. C. Kerner: Die Scherin von Prevorst. 
141 



The Unknown Guest 

girl ;^ the gypsy who, also in writing, fore- 
told all the events in Miss Isabel Arundel's 
life, including the name of her husband, 
Burton, the famous explorer;^ the sealed 
letter addressed to M. Morin, vice-presi- 
dent of the Societe du Mesmerisme, de- 
scribing the most unexpected circumstances 
of a death that occurred a month later ;^ 
the famous "Marmontel prediction," ob- 
tained by Mrs. Verrall's cross-correspond- 
ences, which gives a vision, two months and 
a half before their accomplishment, of the 
most insignificant actions of a traveller in 
an hotel bedroom ;* and many others. 



I will not review the various and very 

^Light, 1907, .p. 219. The crime was committed in 
Paris and made a great stir at the time. 

2LADY Burton: The Life of Captain Sir Richd. F. 
Burton, K.C.M.G., vol. i., p. 253. 

^Journal of the Society for Psychical Research, vol. 
ix., p. 15. 

^Proceedings, vol. xx., p. 331. 

142 



The Unknown Guest 

often grotesque methods of interrogating 
the future that are most frequently prac- 
tised to-day: cards, palmistry, crystal- 
gazing, fortune-telling by means of coffee- 
grounds, tea-leaves, magnetic needles and 
white of egg, graphology, astrology and 
the rest. These methods, as I have already 
said, are worth exactly what the medium 
who employs them is worth. They have 
no other object than to arouse the medium's 
subconsciousness and to bring it into rela- 
tion with that of the person questioning 
him. As a matter of fact, all these purely 
empirical processes are but so many, often 
puerile forms of self-manifestation adopted 
by the undeniable gift which is known as 
intuition, clairvoyance or, in certain cases, 
psychometry. I have spoken at sufficient 
length of this last faculty not to linger over 
it now. All that we have still to do is to 
consider it for a moment in its relations 
with the foretelling of the future. 
143 



The Unknown Guest 

A large number of investigations, nota- 
bly those conducted by M. Duchatel and 
Dr. Osty, show that, in psychometry, the 
notion of time, as Dr. Joseph Maxwell ob- 
serves, is very loose, that is to say, the past, 
present and future nearly always overlap. 
Most of the clairvoyant or psychometric 
subjects, when they are honest, do not 
know, *'do not feel," as M. Duchatel very 
ably remarks, '*what the future is. They do 
not distinguish it from the other tenses; 
and consequently they succeed in being 
prophets, but unconscious prophets." In 
a word — and this is a very important 
indication from the point of view of 
the probable coexistence of the three 
tenses — it appears that they see that which 
is not yet with the same clearness and on 
the same plane as that which is no more, 
but are incapable of separating the two 
visions and picking out the future which 
alone interests us. For a still stronger rea- 
144 



The Unknown Guest 

son, it is impossible for them to state dates 
with precision. Nevertheless, the fact re- 
mains that, when we take the trouble to 
sift their evidence and have the patience to 
await the realization of certain events 
which are sometimes not due for a long 
time to come, the future is fairly often per- 
ceived by some of these strange sooth- 
sayers. 

There are psychometers, however, and 
notably Mme. M , Dr. Osty's favour- 
ite medium, who never confuse the future 
and the past. Mme. M places her vi- 
sions in time according to the position 
which they occupy in space. Thus she sees 
the future in front of her, the past behind 
her and the present beside her. But, not- 
withstanding these distinctly-graded visions, 
she also is incapable of naming her dates 
exactly ; in fact, her mistakes in this respect 
are so general that Dr. Osty looks upon it 
as a pure chronological coincidence when a 
145 



The Unknown Guest 

prediction is realized at the moment fore- 
told. 

We should also observe that, in psy- 
chometry, only those events can be per- 
ceived which relate directly to the individ- 
ual communicating with the percipient, for 
it is not so much the percipient that sees 
into us as we that read in our own subcon- 
sciousness, which is momentarily lighted by 
his presence. We must not therefore ask 
him for predictions of a general character, 
whether, for instance, there will be a war in 
the spring, an epidemic in the summer or 
an earthquake in the autumn. The mo- 
ment the question concerns events, however 
important, with which we are not intimately 
connected, he is bound to answer, as do all 
the genuine mediums, that he sees nothing. 

The area of his vision being thus limited, 

does he really discover the future in it? 

After three years of numerous, cautious and 

systematic experiments with some twenty 

146 



The Unknown Guest 

mediums, Dr. Osty categorically declares 
that he does: 

"All the incidents," he says, "which filled 
these three years of my'life, whether wished 
for by me or not, or even absolutely con- 
trary to the ordinary routine of my life, 
had always been foretold to me, not all by 
each of the clairvoyant subjects, but all by 
one or other of them. As I have been prac- 
tising these tests continually, it seems to me 
that the experience of three years wholly 
devoted to this object should give some 
weight to my opinion on the subject of pre- 
dictions." 

This Is incontestable; and the sincerity, 
scientific conscientiousness and high intel- 
lectual value of Dr. Osty's fine work inspire 
one with the most entire confidence. Un- 
fortunately, he contents himself with quot- 
ing too summarily a few facts and does 
not, as he ought, give us in extenso the de- 
147 



The Unknown Guest 

tails of his experiments, controls and tests. 
I am well aware that this would be a thank- 
less and wearisome task, necessitating a 
large volume which a mass of puerile inci- 
dents and inevitable repetitions would make 
almost unreadable. Moreover, it could 
scarcely help taking the form of an inti- 
mate and indiscreet autobiography; and it 
is not easy to bring one's self to make this 
sort of public confession. But it has to be 
done. In a science which is only in its early 
stages, it is not enough to show the object 
attained and to state one's conviction; it is 
necessary above all to describe every path 
that has been taken and, by an incessant 
and infinite accumulation of investigated 
and attested facts, to enable every one to 
draw his own conclusions. This has been 
the cumbrous and laborious method of the 
Proceedings for over thirty years; and it 
is the only right one. Discussion is possi- 
ble and fruitful only at that price. In all 
148 



The Unknown Guest 

these extraconscious matters, we have not 
yet reached the stage of definite deductions, 
we are still bringing up materials to the 
scene of operations. 

Once more, I know that, in these cases, 
as I have seen for myself, the really con- 
vincing facts are necessarily very rare; in- 
deed, nowhere else do we meet with the 
same difficulty. If the medium tells you, for 

instance, as Mme. M seems easily to 

do, how you will employ your day from the 
morning onwards, if she sees you in a cer- 
tain house in a certain street meeting this 
or that person, it is impossible to say that, 
on the one hand, she is not already reading 
your as yet unconscious plans or intentions, 
or that, on the other hand, by doing what 
she has foreseen, you are not obeying a sug- 
gestion against which you could not fight 
except by violently doing the opposite to 
what It demands of you, which again would 
be a case of inverted suggestion. None 
149 



The Unknown Guest 

therefore would have any value save pre- 
dictions of unlikely happenings, clearly de- 
fined and outside the sphere of the person 
interested. As Dr. Osty says : 

"The ideal prognostication would obvi- 
ously be that of an event so rare, so sud- 
den and unexpected, implying such a change 
in one's mode of life that the theory of co- 
incidence could not decently be put for- 
ward. But, as everybody is not, in the 
peaceful course of his existence, threatened 
by such an absolutely convincing event, the 
clairvoyant cannot always reveal to the per- 
son experimenting — and reveal it for a 
more or less approximate date — one of 
those incidents whose accomplishment 
would carry irresistible conviction." 

In any case, the question of psychometric 
prognostications calls for further enquiry, 
although it is easy even at the present day 
to foresee the results. 
150 



The Unknown Guest 

10 

Let us now return to our spontaneous 
premonitions, in which the future comes to 
seek us of its own accord and, so to speak, 
to challenge us at home. I know from per- 
sonal experience that, when we embark 
upon these disconcerting matters, the first 
impression Is scarcely favourable. We are 
very much inclined to laugh, to treat as 
wearisome tales, as hysterical hallucina- 
tions, as Ingenious or interested fictions 
most of those Incidents which give too vio- 
lent a shock to the narrow and limited idea 
which we have of our human Hfe. To 
smile, to reject everything beforehand and 
to pass by with averted head, as was done, 
remember, In the time of GalvanI and In 
the early days of hypnotism, Is much more 
easy and seems more respectable and pru- 
dent than to stop, admit and examine. 
Nevertheless we must not forget that It Is 
to some who did not smile so lightly that 
151 



The Unknown Guest 

we owe the best part of the man*els from 
whose heights we are preparing to smile 
in our turn. For the rest, I grant that, thus 
presented, hastily and summarily, without 
the details that throw light upon them and 
the proofs that support them, the incidents 
in question do not show to advantage and, 
inasmuch as they are isolated and sparingly 
chosen, lose all the weight and authority 
derived from the compact and imposing 
mass whence they are arbitrarily detached. 
As I said above, nearly a thousand cases 
have been collected, representing probably 
not the tenth part of those which a more 
active and general search might bring to- 
gether. The number is evidently of im- 
portance and denotes the enormous pres- 
sure of the mystery; but, if there were only 
half a dozen genuine cases — and Dr. Max- 
well's, Professor Floumoy's, Mrs. Ver- 
ralPs, the Marmontel, Jones and Hamilton 
cases and some others are undoubtedly 



The Unknown Guest 

genuine — they would be enough to show 
that, under the erroneous idea which we 
form of the past and the present, a new 
verity is living and moving, eager to come 
to light. 

The efforts of that verity, I need hardly 
say, display a very different sort of force 
after we have actually and attentively read 
those hundreds of extraordinary stories 
which, without appearing to do so, strike 
to the very roots of history. We soon lose 
all inclination to doubt. We penetrate into 
another world and come to a stop all out 
of countenance. We no longer know where 
we stand; before and after overlap and 
mingle. We no longer distinguish the in- 
sidious and factitious but indispensable line 
which separates the years that have gone 
by from the years that are to come. We 
clutch at the hours and days of the past and 
present to reassure ourselves, to fasten on 
to some certainty, to convince ourselves that 
153 



The Unknown Guest 

we are still in our right place in this life 
where that which is not yet seems as sub- 
stantial, as real, as positive, as powerful as 
that v/hich is no more. We discover with 
uneasiness that time, on which we based 
our whole existence, itself no longer exists. 
It is no longer the swiftest of our gods, 
known to us only by its flight across all 
things; it alters its position no more than 
space, of which it is doubtless but the in- 
comprehensible reflex. It reigns in the cen- 
tre of every event; and every event is fixed 
in its centre ; and all that comes and all that 
goes passes from end to end of our little 
life without moving by a hair's breadth 
around its motionless pivot. It is entitled 
to but one of the thousand names which we 
have been wont to lavish upon its power, 
a power that seemed to us manifold and 
innumerable: yesterday, recently, formerly, 
erewhile, after, before, to-morrow, soon, 
never, later fall like childish masks, 
154 



The Unknown Guest 

whereas to-day and always completely 
cover with their united shadows the idea 
which we form in the end of a duration 
which has no subdivisions, no breaks and 
no stages, which is pulseless, motionless and 
boundless. 

II 

Many are the theories which men have 
imagined in their attempts to explain the 
working of the strange phenomenon; and 
many others might be imagined. 

As we have seen, self-suggestion and 
telepathy explain certain cases which con- 
cern events already in existence, but still 
latent and perceived before the knowledge 
of them can reach us by the normal process 
of the senses or the intelligence. But, even 
by extending these two theories to their ut- 
termost point and positively abusing their 
accommodating elasticity, we do not suc- 
ceed in illumining by their aid more than a 
155 



The Unknown Guest 

rather restricted portion of the vast ondis- 
coveied land. We most therefore kxik for 

something else. 

The first theory which suggests itself and 
which on the surface seems rather attractive 
is that of spiritualism, which may be ex- 
teaded until it is scarcely distinguishable 
from the theosopMcal theory and other re- 
ligious suppositions. It assumes the sur- 
vival of spirits, the existence of discamate 
or other superior and more mysterious en- 
tities which surround us, interest themselves 
in our fate, guide our thoughts and our ac- 
tions and, above all, know the future. It 
is, as we recognized when speaking of 
ghosts and hanted houses, a very acceptable 
theory; and any one to whom it appears 
can adopt it without doing violence to his 
intelligence. But we must confess that it 
seems less nece^ary and peihaps evea less 
clearly proved in this reg^<m than in that. 
It starts by begging the questioa: without 
1^6 



The Unknown Guest 

the intervention of discarnate beings, the 
spiritualists say, it is impossible to explain 
the majority of the premonitory phenom- 
ena ; therefore we must admit the existence 
of these discarnate beings. Let us grant it 
for the moment, for to beg the question, 
which is merely an indefensible trick of the 
superficial logic of our brain, does not neces- 
sarily condemn a theory and neither takes 
away from nor adds to the reality of things. 
Besides, as we shall insist later, the inter- 
vention or non-intervention of the spirits is 
not the point at issue; and the crux of the 
mystery does not lie there. What must 
Interest us is far less the paths or Intermedi- 
aries by which prophetic warnings reach us 
than the actual existence of the future In the 
present. It Is true — to do complete justice 
to nebsplrltualism — that Its position offers 
certain advantages from the point of view 
of the almost Inconceivable problem of the 
preexlstence of the future. It can evade 
157 



The Unknown Guest 

or divert some of the consequences of that 
problem. The spirits, it declares, do 
not necessarily see the future as a 
whole, as a total past or present, motion- 
less and immovable, but they know infi- 
nitely better than we do the numberless 
causes that determine any agent, so that, 
finding themselves at the luminous source 
of those causes, they have no difficulty in 
foreseeing their effects. They are, with re- 
spect to the incidents still in process of for- 
mation, in the position of an astronomer 
who foretells, within a second, all the 
phases of an eclipse in which a savage sees 
nothing but an unprecedented catastrophe 
which he attributes to the anger of his idols 
of straw or clay. It is indeed possible that 
this acquaintance with a greater number of 
causes explains certain predictions; but 
there are plenty of others which presume a 
knowledge of so many causes, causes so re- 
mote and so profound, that this knowledge 
158 



The Unknown Guest 

is hardly to be distinguished from a knowl- 
edge of the future pure and simple. In any 
case, beyond certain limits, the preexistence 
of causes seems no clearer than that of ef- 
fects. Nevertheless, It must be admitted 
that the spiritualists gain a slight advantage 
here. 

They believe that they gain another 
when they say or might say that it is still 
possible that the spirits stimulate us 
to realize the events which they foretell 
without themselves clearly perceiving them 
in the future. After announcing, for in- 
stance, that on a certain day we shall go to 
a certain place and do a certain thing, they 
urge us irresistibly to proceed to the spot 
named and there to perform the act 
prophesied. But this theory, like those of 
self-suggestion and telepathy, would ex- 
plain only a few phenomena and would 
leave in obscurity all those cases, infinitely 
more numerous because they make up al- 
159 



The Unknown Guest 

most the whole of our future, in which 
either chance intervenes or some event in 
no way dependent upon our will or the 
spirit's, unless indeed we suppose that the 
latter possesses an omniscience and an omni- 
potence which take us back to the original 
mysteries of the problem. 

Besides, in the gloomy regions of pre- 
cognition, it is almost always a matter of 
anticipating a misfortune and very rarely, 
if ever, of meeting with a pleasure or a 
joy. We should therefore have to admit 
that the spirits which drag me to the fatal 
place and compel me to do the act that will 
have tragic consequences are deliberately 
hostile to me and find diversion only in the 
spectacle of my suffering. What could 
those spirits be, from what evil world 
would they arise and how should we ex- 
plain why our brothers and friends of yes- 
terday, after passing through the august 
and peace-bestowing gates of death, sud- 
i6o 



The Unknown Guest 

denly become transformed into crafty and 
malevolent demons? Can the great 
spiritual kingdom, in which all passions 
born of the flesh should be stilled, be but 
a dismal abode of hatred, spite and envy? 
It will perhaps be said that they lead us 
into misfortune in order to purify us; but 
this brings us to religious theories which 
It Is not our intention to examine. 

12 

The only attempt at an explanation that 
can hold its own with spiritualism has re- 
course once again to the mysterious pow- 
ers of our subconsciousness. We must 
needs recognize that, if the future exists 
to-day, already such as it will be when it 
becomes for us the present and the past, 
the Intervention of discarnate minds or of 
any other spiritual entity adrift from an- 
other sphere is of little avail. We can pic- 
ture an Infinite spirit Indifferently contem- 
i6i 



The Unknown Guest 

plating the past and future in their co- 
existence ; we can imagine a whole hierarchy 
of intermediate intelligences taking a more 
or less extensive part in the contemplation 
and transmitting it to our subconsciousness. 
But all this is practically nothing more than 
inconsistent speculation and ingenious 
dreaming in the dark; in any case, it is ad- 
ventitious, secondary and provisional. Let 
us keep to the facts as we see them : an un- 
known faculty, buried deep in our being and 
generally inactive, perceives, on rare occa- 
sions, events that have not yet taken place. 
We possess but one certainty on this sub- 
ject, namely, that the phenomenon actually 
occurs within ourselves; it is therefore 
within ourselves that we must first study it, 
without burdening ourselves with supposi- 
tions which remove it from its centre and 
simply shift the mystery. The incompre- 
hensible mystery is the preexistence of the 
future; once we admit this — and it seems 
162 



The Unknown Guest 

very difficult to deny — there is no reason to 
attribute to imaginary intermediaries 
rather than to ourselves the faculty of 
descrying certain fragments of that future. 
We see, in regard to most of the mediumis- 
tic manifestations, that we possess within 
ourselves all the unusual forces with which 
the spiritualists endow discarnate spirits; 
and why should it be otherwise as concerns 
the powers of divination ? The explanation 
taken from the subconsciousness Is the most 
direct, the simplest, the nearest, whereas 
the other Is endlessly circuitous, complicated 
and distant. Until the spirits testify to 
their existence in an unanswerable fashion, 
there Is no advantage in seeking In the 
grave for the solution of a riddle that ap- 
pears Indeed to lie at the roots of our own 
life. 

It Is true that this explanation does not 
explain much ; but the others are just as In- 
163 



The Unknown Guest 

effectual and are open to the same objec- 
tions. These objections are many and vari- 
ous; and it is easier to raise them than to 
reply to them. For instance, we can ask 
ourselves why the subconsciousness or the 
spirits, seeing that they read the future and 
are able to announce an impending calam- 
ity, hardly ever give us the one useful and 
definite indication that would allow us to 
avoid it. What can be the childish or mys- 
terious reason of this strange reticence? In 
many cases it is almost criminal; for in- 
stance, in a case related by Professor 
Hyslop^ we see the foreboding of the great- 
est misfortune that can befall a mother 
germinating, growing, sending out shoots, 
developing, like some gluttonous and 
deadly plant, to stop short on the verge of 
the last warning, the one detail, insignifi- 
cant in itself but indispensable, which 
would have saved the child. It is the case 

'^Proceedings, vol. xiv., p. 266. 
164 



The Unknown Guest 

of a woman who begins by experiencing a 
vague but powerful impression that a 
grievous "burden" was going to fall upon 
her family. Next month, this premonitory 
feeling repeats itself very frequently, be- 
comes more intense and ends by concentrat- 
ing itself upon the poor woman's little 
daughter. Each time that she is planning 
something for the child's future, she hears 
a voice saying : 

"She'll never need it." 

A week before the catastrophe, a violent 
smell of fire fills the house. From that time 
the mother begins to be careful about 
matches, seeing that they are in safe places 
and out of reach. She looks all over the 
house for them and feels a strong impulse 
to burn all matches of the kind easily 
lighted. About an hour before the fatal 
disaster, she reaches for a box to destroy it ; 
but she says to herself that her eldest boy 
Is gone out, thinks that she may need the 
i6s 



The Unknown Guest 

matches to ligiit the gas-stove and decides 
to destroy tiiem as soon as he comes back. 
She takes the diild np to its crib for its 
momiiig sleep and, as she is putting it into 
the cradle, she heais the usaal mysterions 
¥oice whimper in ha: ear: 

**Xnm the mattress.'' 

Bnt, being m a great hurry^ she simply 
says that she will torn the mattress after 
the child has taken its nap. She then goes 
downstairs to work. After a wfaile^ she 
hears the duld cry and, hiirr3riDg up to the 
room, finds the crib and its bedding on fire 
and the child so badly bomt that it dies 
in three hours. 

14 

6e::re going farther and theorizing 
^: :. : ::.[$ case, let ns once more state the 
m2::er rrezisely. I know that the reader 
IT" .:: rr~z7 and qmte legitimately 
dc£k} -::= • vt :f anecdotes of this kind. 
-36 



The Unknown Guest 

He will say that we have to do with a neu- 
rotic who has drawn upon her imagina- 
tion for all the elements that give a dra- 
matic setting to the story and surround with 
a halo of mystery a sad but commonplace 
domestic accident. This is quite possible; 
and it is perfectly allowable to dismiss the 
case. But it is none the less true that, by 
thus deliberately rejecting everything that 
does not bear the stamp of mathematical or 
judicial certainty, we risk losing as we go 
along most of the opportunities or clues 
which the great riddle of this world offers 
us in its moments of inattention or gracious- 
ness. At the beginning of an enquiry we 
must know how to content ourselves with 
little. For the incident in question to be 
convincing, previous evidence in writing, 
more or less official statements, would be 
required, whereas we have only the decla- 
rations of the husband, a neighbour and a 
sister. This is insufficient, I agree ; but we 
167 



The Unknown Guest 

must at the same time confess that the cir- 
cumstances are hardly favourable to obtain- 
ing the proofs which we demand. Those 
who receive warnings of this kind either be- 
lieve in them or do not believe in them. 
If they believe in them, it is quite natural 
that they should not think first of all of the 
scientific interest of their trouble, or of put- 
ting down in writing and thus authenticat- 
ing its premonitory symptoms and gradual 
evolution. If they do not believe in them, 
it is no less natural that they should not pro- 
ceed to speak or take notice of inanities of 
which they do not recognize the value until 
after they have lost the opportunity of sup- 
plying convincing proofs of them. Also, 
do not forget that the little story in ques- 
tion is selected from among a hundred 
others, which in their turn are equally in- 
decisive, but which, repeating the same 
facts and the same tendencies with a strange 



i68 



The Unknown Guest 

persistency, and by weakening the most in- 
veterate distrust/ 

15 
Having said this much, in order to con- 
ciliate or part company with those who 
have no intention of leaving the terra firma 
of science, let us return to the case before 
us, which is all the more disquieting inas- 
much as we may consider It a sort of proto- 
type of the tragic and almost diabolical 
reticence which we find in most premoni- 
tions. It is probable that under the 
mattress there was a stray match which the 
child discovered and struck; this Is the only 
possible explanation of the catastrophe, for 
there was no fire burning on that floor of 
the house. If the mother had turned the 
mattress, she would have seen the match; 

^See, in particular, Bozzano's cases xlix. and Ixvii. 
These two, especially case xlix., which tells of a per- 
sonal experience of the late W. T. Stead, are sup- 
ported by more substantial proofs. I have quoted 
Professor Hyslop's case, because the reticence is more 
striking. 

169 



The Unknown Guest 

and, on the other hand, she would certainly 
have turned the mattress if she had been 
told that there was a match underneath it. 
Why did the voice that urged her to per- 
form the necessary action not add the one 
word that was capable of ensuring that ac- 
tion? The problem moreover is equally 
perturbing and perhaps equally insoluble 
whether it concerns our own subconscious 
faculties, or spirits, or strange intelligences. 
Those who give these warnings must know 
that they will be useless, because they mani- 
festly foresee the event as a whole ; but they 
must also know that one last word, which 
they do not pronounce, would be enough 
to prevent the misfortune that is already 
consummated in their prevision. They 
know it so well that they bring this word 
to the very edge of the abyss, hold it sus- 
pended there, almost let it fall and re- 
capture it suddenly at the moment when its 
weight would have caused happiness and 
17c 



The Unknown Guest 

life to rise once more to the surface of the 
mighty gulf. What then is this mystery? 
Is it incapacity or hostility ? If they are in- 
capable, what is the unexpected and 
sovran force that interposes between them 
and us? And, if they are hostile, on 
what, on whom are they revenging them- 
selves? What can be the secret of those 
inhuman games, of those uncanny and 
cruel diversions on the most slippery and 
dangerous peaks of fate? Why warn, if 
they know that the warning will be in vain ? 
Of whom are they making sport? Is there 
really an inflexible fatality by virtue of 
which that which has to be accomplished is 
accomplished from all eternity? But then 
why not respect silence, since all speech is 
useless? Or do they, in spite of all, per- 
ceive a gleam, a crevice in the inexorable 
wall? What hope do they find in it? 
Have they not seen more clearly than 
ourselves that no deliverance can come 
171 



The Ln^-i::c'vn Guest 

through that crevice? One could under- 
stand this nuttering and wavering, all these 
efiorts of theirs, if they did not know; but 
here it is proved that they know everything, 
since they foretell exactly that which they 
might prevent. If we press them with 
questions, they answer that there is nothing 
to be done, that no human power could 
avert or thwart the issue. Are they mad, 
bored, irritable, or accessory to a hideous 
pleasantry? Does our fate depend on the 
happy solution of some petty enigma or 
childish conundrum, even as our salvation, 
In most of the so-called revealed religions, 
is settled by a blind and stupid cast of the 
die ? Is all the liberty that we are granted 
reduced to the reading of a more or less 
ingenious riddle? Can the great soul of 
the universe be the soul of a great baby? 

i6 
But. rather than pursue this subject, let 



The Unknown Guest 

us be just and admit that there is perhaps 
no way out of the maze and that our re- 
proaches are as incomprehensible as the 
conduct of the spirits. Indeed, what would 
you have them do in the circle in which our 
logic imprisons them ? Either they foretell 
us a calamity which their predictions can- 
not avert, in which case there is no use in 
foretelling it, or, if they announce it to us 
and at the same time give us the means to 
prevent It, they do not really see the future 
and are foretelling nothing, since the calam- 
ity is not to take place, with the result that 
their action seems equally absurd in both 
cases. 

It is obvious : to whichever side we turn, 
we find nothing but the Incomprehensible. 
On the one hand, the preestabllshed, un- 
shakable, unalterable future which we have 
called destiny, fatality or what you will, 
which suppresses man's entire independence 
and liberty of action and which is the most 
173 



The Unknown Guest 

inconceivable and the dreariest of mys- 
teries ; on the other, intelligences apparently 
superior to our own, since they know what 
we do not, which, while aware that their 
intervention is always useless and very 
often cruel, nevertheless come harassing us 
with their sinister and ridiculous predic- 
tions. Must we resign ourselves once more 
to living with our eyes shut and our reason 
drowned in the boundless ocean of dark- 
ness; and is there no outlet? 

17 

For the moment we will not linger in 
the dark regions of fatality, which is the 
supreme mystery, the desolation of every 
effort and every thought of man. What 
is clearest amid this incomprehensibility is 
that the spiritualistic theory, at first sight 
the most seductive, declares itself, on ex- 
amination, the most difficult to justify. We 
will also once more put aside the theosophi- 
174 



The Unknown Guest 

cal theory or any other which assumes a 
divine intention and which might, to a cer- 
tain extent, explain the hesitations and 
anguish of the prophetic warnings, at the 
cost, however, of other puzzles, a thousand 
times as hard to solve, which nothing au- 
thorizes us to substitute for the actual puz- 
zle, formless and Infinite, presented to our 
uninitiated vision. 

When all is said, it is perhaps only in the 
theory which attributes those premonitions 
to our subconsciousness that we are able to 
find, if not a justification, at least a sort of 
explanation of that formidable reticence. 
They accord fairly well with the strange, 
inconsistent, whimsical and disconcerting 
character of the unknown entity within 
us that seems to live on nothing but 
nondescript fare borrowed from worlds to 
which our intelligence as yet has no access. 
It lives under our reason, in a sort of in- 
visible and perhaps eternal palace, like a 
175 



The Unknown Guest 

casual guest, dropped from another planet, 
whose interests, ideas, habits, passions have 
naught in common with ours. If it seems 
to have notions on the hereafter that are 
infinitely wider and more precise than those 
which we possess, it has only very vague 
notions on the practical needs of our exist- 
ence. It ignores us for years, absorbed no 
doubt with the numberless relations which 
it maintains with all the mysteries of the 
universe ; and, when suddenly it remembers 
us, thinking apparently to please us, it 
makes an enormous, miraculous, but at the 
same time clumsy and superfluous move- 
ment, which upsets all that we believed we 
knew, without teaching us anything. Is it 
making fun of us, is it jesting, is it amus- 
ing Itself, is it facetious, teasing, arch, or 
simply sleepy, bewildered, inconsistent, 
absent-minded? In any case, it is rather 
remarkable that it evidently dislikes to 
make Itself useful. It readily performs the 
176 



The Unknown Guest 

most glamorous feats of sleight-of-hand, 
provided that we can derive no profit from 
them. It lifts up tables, moves the heaviest 
articles, produces flowers and hair, sets 
strings vibrating, gives life to inanimate ob- 
jects and passes through solid matter, con- 
jures up ghosts, subjugates time and space, 
creates light ; but all, it seems, on one con- 
dition, that its performances should be 
without rhyme or reason and keep to the 
province of supernaturally vain and puerile 
recreations. The case of the divining-rod 
is almost the only one in which it lends us 
any regular assistance, this being a sort of 
game, of no great importance, in which it 
appears to take pleasure. Sometimes, to 
say all that can be said, it consents to cure 
certain ailments, cleanses an ulcer, closes a 
wound, heals a lung, strengthens or makes 
supple an arm or leg, or even sets bones, 
but always as it were by accident, without 
reason, method or object, in a deceitful, 
177 



The Unknown Guest 

illogical and preposterous fashion. One 
would set it down as a spoilt child that has 
been allowed to lay hands on the most tre- 
mendous secrets of heaven and earth ; it has 
no suspicion of their power, jumbles them 
all up together and turns them into paltr}^ 
inoffensive toys. It knows everything, per- 
haps, but is ignorant of the uses of its 
knowledge. It has its arms laden with 
treasures which it scatters in the wrong 
manner and at the wrong time, giving bread 
to the thirsty and water to the hungry, 
overloading those who refuse and stripping 
the suppliant bare, pursuing those who flee 
from it and fleeing from those who pursue 
it. Lastly, even at its best moments, it be- 
haves as though the fate of the being in 
whose depths it dwells interested it hardly 
at all, as though it had but an insignificant 
share in his misfortunes, feeling assured, 
one might almost think, of an independent 
and endless existence. 
178 



The Unknown Guest 

It is not surprising, therefore, when we 
know its habits, that its communications on 
the subject of the future should be as fan- 
tastic as the other manifestations of its 
knowledge or its power. Let us add, to be 
quite fair, that, in those warnings which 
we would wish to see efficacious, it stumbles 
against the same difficulties as the spirits 
or other alien intelligences uselessly fore- 
telling the event which they cannot prevent, 
or annihilating the event by the very fact 
of foretelling it. 

i8 

And now, to end the question, is our un- 
known guest alone responsible? Does it 
explain Itself badly or do we not under- 
stand It? When we look into the matter 
closely, there Is, under those anomalous and 
confused manifestations. In spite of efforts 
which we feel to be enormous and perse- 
vering, a sort of Incapacity for self- 
179 



The Unknown Guest 

e: :::t55 :- i:id acdoa which i? bound to 
2. : : : :. : : : u : i n;eiitioaL Is :':.: : : r. scions and 
indiridiial life sqparatec : :r i:: :le 

— :: f: :rom our sobcons: ^ i r::r- 
2b -il life? D: 5 -: - 

i: :: t s : f : 7 : .-: z n Txnknuwu . : ;: '^: izt : .; i i : 
zzt "ins ":-^-:.::i it speski :.::i "".:.:,:i ~- 
dunk that we understand disdose its 
:: : ght? Is every direct road pitilessly 
zi::zi 2nd is there nothing left to it hot 
:: ~ :' ?5ed paths in whidi the best of 
~ 1 to reveal to ns is lost? Is 

: J: 5 r.v it sedks those odd, diild- 

ish, r: . : : . : " ^ of automatic wilting, 
cross-: : : 7 s :: i i : t /^olic premonition 

Z'tA z.l .7 rt.: ' _ r: ". "he typical C2?e 
— ':..::. -■t ':.i:rt :.:::7i .: rteins to sreik 
quite easily an^ r 2 ::/ ~i:t:: : S2 5 :: :^e 
.T.::hcr: 

it find it I-:!: :: "::ss re :: 2ii: 



The Unknown Guest 

"You will find the matches there that 
will set fire to the curtains/' 

What forbids it to do so and closes its 
mouth at the decisive moment? We relapse 
into the everlasting question: if it cannot 
complete the second sentence because it 
would be destroying in the womb the very 
event which it is foretelling, why does it 
utter the first? 

19 

But it is well in spite of everything to 
seek an explanation of the inexplicable; it 
is by attacking it on every side, at all 
hazards, that we cherish the hope of over- 
coming it; and we may therefore say to 
ourselves that our subconsciousness, when it 
warns us of a calamity that is about to fall 
upon us, knowing all the future as it does, 
necessarily knows that the calamity is al- 
ready accomplished. As our conscious and 
unconscious lives blend in it, it distresses it- 
181 



The Unknown Guest 

self and flutters around our overconfident 
Ignorance. It tries to inform us, through 
nervousness, through pity, so as to mitigate 
the lightning cruelty of the blow. It speaks 
all the words that can prepare us for Its 
coming, define It and identify it; but it is 
unable to say those which would prevent 
it from coming, seeing that It has come, 
that it Is already present and perhaps past, 
manifest. Ineffaceable, on another plane 
than that on which we live, the only plane 
which we are capable of perceiving. It 
finds itself, in a word, In the position of 
the man who. In the midst of peaceful, 
happy and unsuspecting folk, alone knows 
some bad news. He is neither able nor 
willing to announce It nor yet to hide It 
completely. He hesitates, delays, makes 
more or less transparent allusions, but does 
not either say the last word that would, so 
to speak, let loose the catastrophe In the 
hearts of the people around him, for to 
182 



The Unknown Guest 

those who do not know of it the catastrophe 
Is still as though it were not there. Our 
subconsciousness, in that case, would act 
towards the future as we act towards the 
past, the two conditions being identical, so 
much so that it often confuses them, as 
we can see more particularly in the cele- 
brated Marmontel case, where it evidently 
blunders and reports as accomplished an 
Incident that will not take place until several 
months later. It Is of course impossible 
for us, at the stage which we have reached, 
to understand this confusion or this coexist- 
ence of the past, the present and the future ; 
but that Is no reason for denying it ; on the 
contrary, what man understands least is 
probably that which most nearly approaches 
the truth. 

20 

Lastly, to complicate the question, It may 
be very justly objected that, though pre- 
183 



The Unknown Guest 

monitions in general are useless and appear 
systematically to withhold the only indis- 
pensable and decisive words, there are, 
nevertheless, some that often seem to save 
those who obey them. These, it is true, 
are rarer than the first, but still they include 
a certain number that are well-authenti- 
cated. It remains to be seen how far they 
imply a knowledge of the future. 

Here, for instance, is a traveller who, 
arriving at night in a small unknown town 
and walking along the ill-lighted dock in 
the direction of an hotel of which he 
roughly knows the position, at a given mo- 
ment feels an irresistible impulse to turn 
and go the other way. He instantly obeys, 
though his reason protests and "berates him 
for a fool" in taking a roundabout way to 
his destination. The next day he discovers 
that, if he had gone a few feet farther, he 
would certainly have slipped into the river ; 
and, as he was but a feeble swimmer, he 
184 



The Unknown Guest 

would just as certainly, being alone and un- 
aided in the extreme darkness, have been 
drowned.^ 

But is this a prevision of an event ? No, 
for no event is to take place. There is 
simply an abnormal perception of the prox- 
imity of some unknown water and conse- 
quently of an Imminent danger, an unex- 
plained but fairly frequent subliminal sensi- 
tiveness. In a word, the problem of the 
future is not raised in this case, nor in any 
of the numerous cases that resemble It. 

Here is another which evidently belongs 
to the same class, though at first sight it 
seems to postulate the preexistence of a 
fatal event and a vision of the future cor- 
responding exactly with a vision of the past. 
A traveller In South America Is descending 
a river in a canoe ; the party are just about 
to run close to a promontory when a sort 
of mysterious voice, which he has already 

^Proceedings, vol. xi., p. 422. 
185 



The Unknown Guest 

heard at different momentous times of his 
Hfe, imperiously orders him immediately to 
cross the river and gain the other shore as 
quickly as possible. This appears so ab- 
surd that he is obliged to threaten the In- 
dians with death to force them to take this 
course. They have scarcely crossed more 
than half the river when the promontory 
falls at the very place where they meant to 
round it.^ 

The perception of imminent danger is 
here, I admit, even more abnormal than 
in the previous example, but it comes under 
the same heading. It is a phenomenon 
of subliminal hypersensitiveness observed 
more than once, a sort of premonition in- 
duced by subconscious perceptions, which 
has been christened by the barbarous name 
of *'cryptaesthesia." But the interval be- 
tween the moment when the peril is sig- 
nalled and that at which it is consummated 

^Flournoy: Esprits et mediums, p. 316. 
186 



The Unknown Guest 

is too short for those questions which re- 
late to a knowledge or a preexistence of 
the future to arise in this instance. 

The case is almost the same with the 
adventure of an American dentist, very 
carefully investigated by Dr. Hodgson. 
The dentist was bending over a bench on 
which was a little copper in which he was 
vulcanizing some rubber, when he heard a 
voice calling, in a quick and imperative 
manner, these words: 

"Run to the window, quick! Run to 
the window, quick !'' 

He at once ran to the window and looked 
out to the street below, when suddenly he 
heard a tremendous report and, looking 
round, saw that the copper had exploded, 
destroying a great part of the workroom.^ 

Here again, a subconscious cautiousness 
was probably aroused by certain indications 
imperceptible to our ordinary senses. It is 

'^Proceedings, vol. xi., p. 424. 
187 



The Unknown Guest 

even possible that there exists between 
things and ourselves a sort of sympathy or 
subliminal communion which makes us ex- 
perience the trials and emotions of matter 
that has reached the limits of its existence, 
unless, as is more likely, there is merely a 
simple coincidence between the chance idea 
of a possible explosion and its realization. 

A last and rather more complicated case 
is that of Jean Dupre, the sculptor, who 
was driving alone with his wife along a 
mountain road, skirting a perpendicular 
cliff. Suddenly they both heard a voice that 
seemed to come from the mountain crying: 

'^Stop !" 

They turned round, saw nobody and con- 
tinued their road. But the cries were re- 
peated again and again, without anything to 
reveal the presence of a human being amid 
the solitude. At last the sculptor alighted 
and saw that the left wheel of the carriage, 
which was grazing the edge of the preci- 
i88 



The Unknown Guest 

pice, had lost its linch-pin and was on the 
point of leaving the axle-tree, which would 
almost inevitably have hurled the carriage 
into the abyss. 

Need we, even here, relinquish the theory 
of subconscious perceptions ? Do we know 
and can the author of the anecdote, whose 
good faith is not in question, tell us that 
certain unperceived circumstances, such as 
the grating of the wheel or the swaying of 
the carriage, did not give him the first 
alarm? After all, we know how easily 
stories of this kind involuntarily take a 
dramatic turn even at the actual moment 
and especially afterwards. 

21 

These examples — and there are many 
more of a similar kind — are enough, I 
think, to illustrate this class of premoni- 
tions. The problem in these cases is simpler 
than when it relates to fruitless warnings; 
189 



The Unknown Guest 

at least It Is simpler so long as we do not 
bring Into discussion the question of spirits, 
of unknown intelligences, or of an actual 
knowledge of the future; otherwise the 
same difficulty reappears and the warning, 
which this time seems efficacious, Is In real- 
ity just as vain. In fact, the mysterious 
entity which knows that the traveller will 
go to the water's edge, that the wheel will 
be on the point of leaving the axle, that the 
copper will explode, or that the promontory 
will fall at a precise moment, must at the 
same time know that the traveller will not 
take the last fatal step, that the carriage 
will not be overturned, that the copper will 
not hurt anybody and that the canoe will 
pull away from the promontory. It is inad- 
missible that, seeing one thing. It will not 
see the other, since everything happens at 
the same point, In the course of the same 
second. Can we say that, if it had not 
given warning, the little saving movement 
190 



The Unknown Guest 

would not have been executed? How can 
we imagine a future which, at one and the 
same time, has parts that are steadfast and 
others that are not? If it is foreseen that 
the promontory will fall and that the 
traveller will escape, thanks to the super- 
natural warning, it is necessarily foreseen 
that the warning will be given; and, if so, 
what is the point of this futile comedy? 
I see no reasonable explanation of it in the 
spiritist or spiritualistic theory, which postu- 
lates a complete knowledge of the future, 
at least at a settled point and moment. On 
the other hand, if we adhere to the theory 
of a subliminal consciousness, we find there 
an explanation which is quite worthy of 
acceptation. This subliminal consciousness, 
though, in the majority of cases, it has no 
clear and comprehensive vision of the im- 
mediate future, can nevertheless possess 
an intuition of imminent danger, thanks to 
indications that escape our ordinary percep- 
191 



The Unknown Guest 

tion. It can also have a partial, Intermit- 
tent and so to speak flickering vision of 
the future event and, if doubtful, can risk 
giving an incoherent warning, which, for 
that matter, will change nothing In that 
which already Is. 

22 

In conclusion, let us state once more that 
fruitful premonitions necessarily annihilate 
events in the bud and consequently work 
their own destruction, so that any control 
becomes impossible. They would have an 
existence only if they prophesied a general 
event which the subject would not escape 
but for the warning. If they had said to 
any one intending to go to Messina two or 
three months before the catastrophe, 
"Don't go, for the town will be destroyed 
before the month Is out," we should have 
an excellent example. But It Is a remark- 
able thing that genuine premonitions of 
192 



The Unknown Guest 

this kind are very rare and nearly always 
rather indefinite in regard to events of a 
general order. In M. Bozzano's excellent 
collection, which is a sort of compendium 
of premonitory phenomena, the only pretty 
clear cases are nos. civ. and clvili., both of 
which are taken from the Journal of the 
S.P.R. In the first/ a mother sent a 
servant to bring home her little daughter, 
who had already left the house with the 
Intention of going through the "railway 
garden," a strip of ground between the sea- 
wall and the railway-embankment, in order 
to sit on the great stones by the seaside 
and see the trains pass by. A few minutes 
after the little girl's departure, the mother 
had distinctly and repeatedly heard a voice 
within her say: 

"Send for her back, or something dread- 
ful will happen to her.'* 

Now, soon after, a train ran off the line 

^Journal, vol. viii., p. 45. 
193 



The Unknown Guest 

and the engine and tender fell, breaking 
through the protecting wall and crashing 
down on the very stones where the child 
was accustomed to sit. 

In the other case,^ into which Professor 
W. F. Barrett made a special enquiry, Cap- 
tain MacGowan was in Brooklyn with his 
two boys, then on their holidays. He 
promised the boys that he would take them 
to the theatre and booked seats on the 
previous day; but on the day of the pro- 
posed visit he heard a voice within him con- 
stantly saying: 

"Do not go to the theatre; take the boys 
back to school." 

He hesitated, gave up his plan and re- 
sumed it again. But the words kept repeat- 
ing themselves and impressing themselves 
upon him; and, in the end, he definitely 
decided not to go, much to the two boys' 
disgust. That night the theatre was de- 

^Ibid., vol. i., p. 283. 

194 



The Unknown Guest 

stroyed by fire, with a loss of three hun- 
dred lives. 

We may add to this the prevision of the 
Battle of Borodino, to which I have already 
alluded. I will give the story in fuller de- 
tail, as told in the journal of Stephen Grel- 
let the Quaker. 

About three months before the French 
army entered Russia, the wife of General 
Toutschkoff dreamt that she was at an inn 
in a town unknown to her and that her 
father came into her room, holding her 
only son by the hand, and said to her, in a 
pitiful tone: 

"Your happiness is at an end. He'* 
— meaning Countess Toutschkoff's hus- 
band — "has fallen. He has fallen at 
Borodino." 

The dream was repeated a second and a 
third time. Her anguish of mind was such 
that she woke her husband and asked him : 

"Where is Borodino?" 
195 



The Unknown Guest 

They looked for the name on the map 
and did not find it. 

Before the French armies reached Mos- 
cow, Count Toutschkoff was placed at the 
head of the army of reserve; and one morn- 
ing her father, holding her son by the hand, 
entered her room at the inn where she was 
staying. In great distress, as she had be- 
held him in her dream, he cried out : 

''He has fallen. He has fallen at Boro- 
dino." 

Then she saw herself in the very same 
room and through the windows beheld the 
very same objects that she had seen in her 
dreams. Her husband was one of the many 
who perished in the battle fought near the 
River Borodino, from which an obscure 
village takes its name.^ 

This is evidently a very rare and perhaps 

^Memoirs of the Life and Labours of Stephen 
Grellet, vol. i., p. 434. 

196 



The Unknown Guest 

solitary example of a long-dated prediction 
of a great historic event which nobody- 
could foresee. It stirs more deeply than 
any other the enormous problems of fatal- 
ity, free-will and responsibility. But has 
It been attested with sufficient rigour for 
us to rely upon it? That I cannot say. In 
any case, it has not been sifted by the 
S.P.R. Next, from the special point of 
view that Interests us for the moment, we 
are unable to declare that this premonition 
had any chance of being of avail and pre- 
venting the general from going to Boro- 
dino. It is highly probable that he did not 
know where he was going or where he 
was; besides, the Irresistible machinery of 
war held him fast and it was not his 
part to disengage his destiny. The pre- 
monition, therefore, could only have been 
given because it was certain not to be 
obeyed. 

As for the two previous cases, nos. civ. 
197 



The Unknown Guest 

and clvlii., we must here again remark the 
usual strange reservations and observe how 
difficult it is to explain these premonitions 
save by attributing them to our subcon- 
sciousness. The main, unavoidable event is 
not precisely stated; but a subordinate con- 
sequence seems to be averted, as though to 
make us believe in some definite power of 
free-will. Nevertheless, the mysterious en- 
tity that foresaw the catastrophe must also 
have foreseen that nothing would happen 
to the person whom it was warning; and 
this brings us back to the useless farce of 
which we spoke above. Whereas, with the 
theory of a subconscious self, the latter may 
have — as in the case of the traveller, the 
promontory, the copper or the carriage — 
not this time by inferences or indications 
that escape our perception, but by other un- 
known means, a vague presentiment of an 
impending peril, or, as I have already said, 
a partial, intermittent and unsettled vision 
198 



The Unknown Guest 

of the future event, and, In its doubt, may 
utter its cry of alarm. 

Whereupon let us recognize that it is 
almost forbidden to human reason to stray 
in these regions; and that the part of a 
prophet is, next to that of a commentator 
of prophecies, one of the most difficult and 
thankless that a man can attempt to sustain 
on the world's stage. 

24 

I am not sure if it is really necessary, 
before closing this chapter, to follow in the 
wake of many others and broach the prob- 
lem of the preexistence of the future, which 
includes those of fatality, of free-will, of 
time and of space, that is to say, all the 
points that touch the essential sources of the 
great . mystery of the universe. The theo- 
logians and the metaphysicians have tackled 
these problems from every side without 
giving us the least hope of solving them. 
199 



The Unknown Guest 

Among those which life sets us, there is 
none to which our brain seems more defi- 
nitely and strictly closed; and they remain, 
if not as unimaginable, at least as incom- 
prehensible as on the day when they were 
first perceived. What corresponds, outside 
us, with what we call time and space ? We 
know nothing about it : and Kant, speaking 
in the name of the "apriorists," who hold 
that the idea of time is innate In us, does 
not teach us much when he tells us that 
time, like space, Is an a priori form of our 
sensibilit}^ that is to say, an intuition pre- 
ceding experience, even as Guyau, among 
the "empiricists," who consider that this 
idea is acquired only by experience, does 
not enlighten us any more by declaring that 
this same time is the abstract formula of 
the changes in the universe. Whether 
space, as Leibnitz maintains, be an order 
of coexistence and time an order of se- 
quences, whether it be by space that w^e 

200 



The Unknown GueSt 

succeed In representing time or whether 
time be an essential form of any represen- 
tation, whether time be the father of space 
or space the father of time, one thing is 
certain, which Is that the efforts of the 
Kantian or neo-Kantian aprlorlsts and of 
the pure empiricists and the idealistic em- 
piricists all end In the same darkness; that 
all the philosophers who have grappled 
with the formidable dual problem, among 
whom one may mention Indiscriminately 
the names of the greatest thinkers of yes- 
terday and to-day — Herbert Spencer, 
Helmholtz, Renouvler, James Sully, 
Stumpf, James Ward, William James, 
Stuart Mill, RIbot, Foulllee, Guyau, Bain, 
Lechalas, Balmes, Dunan and endless 
others — have been unable to tame it; and 
that, however much their theories may con- 
tradict one another, they are all equally 
defensible and alike struggle vainly in the 

201 



The Unknown Guest 

darkness against shadows that are not of 
our world. 

25 
To catch a glimpse of this strange prob- 
lem of the preexistence of the future, as it 
shows itself to each of us, let us essay more 
humbly to translate it into tangible images, 
to place it as it were upon the stage. I am 
writing these lines sitting on a stone, in the 
shade of some tall beeches that overlook a 
little Norman village. It is one of those 
lovely summer days when the sweetness of 
life is almost visible In the azure vase of 
earth and sky. In the distance stretches 
the immense, fertile valley of the Seine, 
with its green meadows planted with rest- 
ful trees, between which the river flows like 
a long path of gladness leading to the misty 
hills of the estuary. I am looking down on 
the village-square, with its ring of young 
lime-trees. A procession leaves the church 
and, amid prayers and chanting, they carry 
202 



The Unknown Guest 

the statue of the Virgin around the sacred 
pile. I am conscious of all the details of 
the ceremony : the sly old cure perfunctorily 
bearing a small reliquary; four choirmen 
opening their mouths to bawl forth va- 
cantly the Latin words which convey noth- 
ing to them; two mischievous serving-boys 
in frayed cassocks; a score of little girls, 
young girls and old maids in white, all 
starched and flounced, followed by six or 
seven .village notables in baggy frock- 
coats. The pageant disappears behind the 
trees, comes into sight again at the bend 
of the road and hurries back into the 
church. The clock in the steeple strikes five, 
as though to ring down the curtain and 
mark in the infinite history of events which 
none will recollect the conclusion of a spec- 
tacle which never again, until the end of 
the world and of the universe of worlds, 
will be just what it was during those sec- 
onds when it beguiled my wandering eyes. 
203 



The Unknown Guest 

For in vain will they repeat the proces- 
sion next year and every year after : never 
again will it be the same. Not only will 
several of the actors probably have disap- 
peared, but all those who resume their old 
places in the ranks will have undergone the 
thousand little visible and invisible changes 
wrought by the passing days and weeks. In 
a word, this insignificant moment is unique, 
irrecoverable, inimitable, as are all the mo- 
ments in the existence of all things; and 
this little picture, enduring for a few sec- 
onds suspended in boundless duration, has 
lapsed into eternity, where henceforth it 
will remain in its entirety to the end of 
time, so much so that, if a man could one 
day recapture in the past, among what 
some one has called the "astral negatives," 
the image of what it was, he would find it 
intact, unchanged, ineffaceable and unde- 
niable. 

204 



The Unknown Guest 

26 

It Is not difficult for us to conceive that 
one can thus go back and see again the 
astral negative of an event that Is no more ; 
and retrospective clairvoyance appears to 
us a wonderful but not an Impossible thing. 
It astonishes but does not stagger our rea- 
son. But, when it becomes a question of 
discovering the same picture In the future, 
the boldest imagination flounders at the first 
step. How are we to admit that there 
exists somewhere a representation or repro- 
duction of that which has not yet existed? 
Nevertheless, some of the Incidents which 
we have just been considering seem to prove 
In an almost conclusive manner not only 
that such representations are possible, but 
that we may arrive at them more fre- 
quently, not to say more conveniently, than 
at those of the past. Now, once this rep- 
resentation preexists, as we are obliged to 
admit In the case of a certain number of 
20s 



The Unknown Guest 

premonitions, the riddle remains the same 
whether the preexistence be one of a few 
hours, a few years or several centuries. It 
is therefore possible — ^for, in these mat- 
ters, we must go straight to extremes or else 
leave them alone — it is therefore possible 
that a seer mightier than any of to-day, 
some god, demigod or demon, some un- 
known, universal or vagrant intelligence, 
saw that procession a million years ago, at 
a time when nothing existed of that which 
composes and surrounds it and when the 
very earth on which it moves had not yet 
risen from the ocean depths. And other 
seers, as mighty as the first, who from age 
to age contemplated the same spot and the 
same moment, would always have per- 
ceived, through the vicissitudes and up- 
heavals of seas, shores and forests, the 
same procession going round the same 
little church that still lay slumbering in the 
oceanic ooze and made up of the same per- 
206 



The Unknown Guest 

sons sprung from a race that was perhaps 
not yet represented on the earth. 

27 

It Is obviously difficult for us to under- 
stand that the future can thus precede 
chaos, that the present Is at the same time 
the future and the past, or that that which 
Is not yet exists already at the same time 
at which it Is no more. But, on the other 
hand, It is just as hard to conceive that 
the future does not preexist, that there Is 
nothing before the present and that every- 
thing Is only present or past. It Is very 
probable that, to a more universal Intelli- 
gence than ours, everything is but an eter- 
nal present, an Immense punctum starts^ as 
the metaphysicians say. In which all the 
events are on one plane; but it is no less 
probable that we ourselves, so long as we 
are men. In order to understand anything of 
this eternal present, will always be obliged 
207 



The Unknown Guest 

to divide it into three parts. Thus caught 
between two mysteries equally baffling to 
our intelligence, whether we deny or admit 
the preexistence of the future, we are really 
only wrangling over words : in the one case, 
we give the name of "present," from the 
point of view of a perfect intelligence, to 
that which to us is the future ; in the other, 
we give the name of "future" to that which, 
from the point of view of a perfect intel- 
ligence. Is the present. But, after all, it is 
Incontestable in both cases that, at least 
from our point of view, the future preexists, 
since preexistence is the only name by which 
we can describe and the only form under 
which we can conceive that which we do 
not yet see In the present. 

28 

Attempts have been made to shed light 
on the riddle by transferring it to space. It 
is true that It there loses the greater part 
208 



The Unknown Guest 

of its obscurity; but this apparently is be- 
cause, in changing its environment, it has 
completely changed its nature and no 
longer bears any relation to what it was 
when it was placed in time. We are told, 
for instance, that innumerable cities dis- 
tributed over the surface of the earth are 
to us as if they were not, so long as we 
have not seen them, and only begin to exist 
on the day when we visit them. That is 
true; but space, outside all metaphysical 
speculations, has realities for us which 
time does not possess. Space, although 
very mysterious and incomprehensible once 
we pass certain limits, is nevertheless not, 
like time, incomprehensible and illusory in 
all its parts. We are certainly quite able 
to conceive that those towns which we have 
never seen and doubtless never will see in- 
dubitably exist, whereas we find it much 
more difficult to imagine that the catas- 
trophe which, fifty years hence, will annihi- 
209 



The Unknown Guest 

late one of them already exists as really as 
the town itself. We are capable of pic- 
turing a spot whence, with keener eyes than 
those which we boast to-day, we should see 
in one glance all the cities of the earth and 
even those of other worlds, but it is much 
less easy for us to imagine a point in the 
ages whence we should simultaneously dis- 
cover the past, the present and the future, 
because the past, the present and the future 
are three orders of duration which cannot 
find room at the sam.e tim.e in our intelli- 
gence and which inevitabl}^ devour one an- 
other. How can we picture to ourselves, 
for instance, a point in eternity at which 
our little procession already exists, while it 
is not yet and although it is no more ? Add 
to this the thought that it is necessary and 
inevitable, from the millenaries which had 
no beginning, that, at a given moment, at 
a given place, the little procession should 
leave the little church in a given manner 

2IO 



The Unknown Guest 

and that no known or imaginable will can 
change anything in it, in the future any 
more than in the past; and we begin to 
understand that there is no hope of under- 
standing. 

29 
We find among the cases collected by M. 
Bozzano a singular premonition wherein 
the unknown factors of space and time are 
continued In a very curious fashion. In 
August, 19 10, Cavaliere Giovanni de 
Figueroa, one of the most famous fencing- 
masters at Palermo, dreamt that he was 
in the country, going along a road white 
with dust, which brought him to a broad 
ploughed field. In the middle of the field 
stood a rustic building, with a ground- 
floor used for store-rooms and cow-sheds 
and on the right a rough hut made of 
branches and a cart with some harness ly- 
ing in it. 

A peasant wearing dark trousers, with a 

211 



The Unknown Guest 

black felt hat on his head, came forward to 
meet him, asked him to follow him and took 
him round behind the house. Through a 
low, narrow door they entered a little stable 
with a short, winding stone staircase lead- 
ing to a loft over the entrance to the house. 
A mule fastened to a swinging manger was 
blocking the bottom step ; and the chevalier 
had to push it aside before climbing the 
staircase. On reaching the loft, he noticed 
that from the ceiling were suspended strings 
of melons, tomatoes, onions and Indian 
com. In this room were two women and a 
little girl; and through a door leading to 
another room he caught sight of an extreme- 
ly high bed, unlike any that he had ever seen 
before. 

Here the dream broke off. It seemed to 
him so strange that he spoke of it to several 
of his friends, whom he mentions by name 
and who are ready to confirm his state- 
ments. 

212 



The Unknown Guest 

On the 1 2th of October in the same year, 
in order to support a fellow-townsman in a 
duel, he accompanied the seconds, by motor- 
car, from Naples to Marano, a place which 
he had never visited nor even heard of. As 
soon as they were some way in the country, 
he was curiously impressed by the white and 
dusty road. The car pulled up at the side 
of a field which he at once recognized. 
They alighted; and he remarked to one of 
the seconds: 

"This is not the first time that I have 
been here. There should be a house at the 
end of this path and on the right a hut and 
a cart with some harness in it." 

As a matter of fact, everything was as he 
described it. An instant later, at the exact 
moment foreseen by the dream, the peasant 
in the dark trousers and the black felt hat 
came up and asked him to follow him. But, 
instead of walking behind him, the chevalier 
went in front, for he already knew the way. 
213 



The Unknown Guest 

He found the stable and, exactly at the 
place which it occupied two months before, 
near its swinging manger, the mule blocking 
the way to the staircase. The fencing- 
master went up the steps and once more saw 
the loft, with the ceiling hung with melons, 
onions and tomatoes, and, in a comer on the 
right, the two silent women and the child, 
identical with the figures in his dream, while 
in the next room he recognized the bed 
whose extraordinary height had so much 
impressed him. 

It really looks as if the facts themselves, 
the extramundane realities, the eternal veri- 
ties, or whatever we may be pleased to call 
them, have tried to show us here that time 
and space are one and the same illusion, one 
and the same convention and have no exist- 
ence outside our little day-spanned under- 
standing; that "everywhere" and *'always" 
are exactly synonymous terms and reign 
alone as soon as we cross the narrow 
214 



The Unknown Guest 

boundaries of the obscure consciousness in 
which we live. We are quite ready to 
admit that Cavallere de Figueroa may have 
had by clairvoyance an exact and detailed 
vision of places which he was not to visit 
until later : this is a pretty frequent and al- 
most classical phenomenon, which, as it 
affects the realities of space, does not as- 
tonish us beyond measure and, in any case, 
does not take us out of the world which 
our senses perceive. The field, the house, 
the hut, the loft do not move ; and it is no 
miracle that they should be found in the 
same place. But, suddenly, quitting this 
domain where all Is stationary, the phenom- 
enon Is transferred to time and, in those un- 
known places, at the foretold second, brings 
together all the moving actors of that little 
drama in two acts, of which the first was 
performed some two and a half months 
before, in the depths of some mysterious 
other life where it seemed to be motlon- 
215 



The Unknown Guest 

lessly and irrevocably awaiting its terres- 
trial realization. Any caqplanation would 
but condense tbis vapour of petty mysteries 
into a few drops in the ocean of mysteries. 
Ldr us note heie again, ir. ::.:'.r.r tbe 
strange freakisfaness of thes r : . t . . : . : n? , 
They accunnJate the most p : 7 : . : - i :: i : :• 
cumstantial details as long as the scene re- 
mains insignificant, but come to a sudden 
stop before the one tragic and interesting 
scene of the drama: the duel and its issue. 
Here again we recognize the inconsistent, 
inqpotent, ircmical or humc: ibits of 

ocnr unknown guest. 

30 

Z : -z — 1 : : . rns: these somewhat 

Tain szzi : .' \ : : : .'- :-:. '. -Zg sid 2ce and 
time. We 1:7 r.-.7:7' i.-.zl ~\'-Z words 
that represent very badly ideas which we 
do not put into form at all. To sum up, 
if it is dEIEcult for us to conceive that the 



The Unknown Guest 

future preexists, perhaps it is even more 
difficult for us to understand that It does 
not exist; moreover, a certain number of 
facts tend to prove that It is as real and 
definite and has, both in time and in eter- 
nity, the same permanence and the same 
vividness as the past. Now, from the mo- 
ment that it preexists, it is not surprising 
that we should be able to know it ; It Is even 
astonishing, granted that it overhangs us on 
every side, that we should not discover it oft- 
ener and more easily. It remains to be learnt 
what would become of our life if every- 
thing were foreseen in it, If we saw It un- 
folding beforehand, in its entirety, with Its 
events which would have to be inevitable, 
because, if it were possible for us to avoid 
them, they would not exist and we could 
not perceive them. Suppose that, Instead of 
being abnormal, uncertain, obscure, debata- 
ble and very unusual, prediction became, so 
to speak, scientific, habitual, clear and infal- 
217 



The Unknown Guest 

lible : In a short time, having nothing more 
to foretell, it would die of inanition. If, for 
instance, it was prophesied to me that I 
must die In the course of a journey in Italy, 
I should naturally abandon the journey; 
therefore it could not have been predicted 
to me ; and thus all life would soon be noth- 
ing but inaction, pause and abstention, a 
sort of vast desert where the embryos of 
still-born events would be gathered In heaps 
and where nothing would grow save per- 
haps one or two more or less fortunate en- 
terprises and the little insignificant Incidents 
which no one would trouble to avoid. But 
these again are questions to which there Is 
no solution; and we will not pursue them 
further. 



218 



CHAPTER IV 

THE ELBERFELD HORSES 



CHAPTER IV 

THE ELBERFELD HORSES 
I 

I WILL first sum up as briefly as pos- 
sible, for whoso may still be ignorant 
of them, the facts which it is necessary to 
know if one would fully understand the 
marvellous story of the Elberfeld horses. 
For a detailed account, I can refer him to 
Herr Karl Krall's remarkable work. Den- 
kende Tiere (Leipsic, 19 12), which is the 
first and principal source of information 
amid a bibliography that is already assum- 
ing considerable dimensions. 

Some twenty years ago there lived in 
Berlin an old misanthrope named Wilhelm 
von Osten. He was a man with a small 
private income, a little eccentric in his ways 
and obsessed by one idea, the intelligence of 
animals. He began by undertaking the 
221 



The Unknown Guest 

education of a horse that gave him no very 
definite results. But, in 1900, he became 
the owner of a Russian stallion who, under 
the " name of Hans, to which was soon 
added the Homeric and well-earned prefix 
of Kluge, or Clever, was destined to upset 
all our notions of animal psychology and to 
raise questions that rank among the most 
unexpected and the most absorbing prob- 
lems which man has yet encountered. 

Thanks to Von Osten, whose patience, 
contrary to what one might think, was in 
no wise angelic but resembled rather a 
frenzied obstinacy, the horse made rapid 
and extraordinary progress. This progress 
is very aptly described by Professor E. 
Clarapede, of the university of Geneva, 
who says, in his excellent monograph on the 
Elberf eld horses ; 

"After making him familiar with various 
common ideas, such as right, left, top, bot- 
222 



The Unknown Guest 

torn and so on, his master began to teach 
him arithmetic by the intuitive method. 
Hans was brought to a table on which were 
placed first one, then two, then several 
small skittles. Von Osten, kneeling beside 
Hans, uttered the corresponding numbers, 
at the same time making him strike as many 
blows with his hoof as there were skittles 
on the table. Before long, the skittles were 
replaced by figures written on a blackboard. 
The results were astonishing. The horse 
was capable not only of counting (that Is 
to say, of striking as many blows as he was 
asked), but also of himself making real 
calculations, of solving little problems, . . . 
''But Hans could do more than mere 
sums : he knew how to read ; he was a musi- 
cian, distinguishing between harmonious 
and dissonant chords. He also had an ex- 
traordinary memory : he could tell the date 
of each day of the current week. In short, 
he got through all the tasks which an Intel- 
223 



The Unknown Guest 

llgent schoolboy of fourteen is able to per- 
form." 

2 

The rumour of these curious experiments 
soon spread; and visitors flocked to the 
little stable-yard in which Von Osten kept 
his singular pupil at work. The newspapers 
took the matter up ; and a fierce controversy 
broke forth between those who believed in 
the genuineness of the phenomenon and 
those who saw no more in it than a bare- 
faced fraud. A scientific committee was 
appointed in 1904, consisting of professors 
of psychology and physiology, of the di- 
rector of a zoological garden, of a circus- 
manager and of veterinary surgeons and 
cavalr}^-officers. The committee discovered 
nothing suspicious, but ventured upon no 
explanation. A second committee was then 
appointed, numbering among its members 
Herr Oskar Pfungst, of the Berlin psycho- 
logical laboratory. Herr Pfungst, after a 
224 



The Unknown Guest 

long series of experiments, drew up a volu- 
minous and crushing report, in which he 
maintained that the horse was gifted with 
no intelligence, that it did not recognize 
either letters or figures, that it really knew 
neither how to calculate nor how to count, 
but merely obeyed the imperceptible, in- 
finitesimal and unconscious signs which 
escaped from its master. 

Public opinion veered round suddenly 
and completely. People felt a sort of half- 
cowardly relief at beholding the prompt 
collapse of a miracle which was threatening 
to throw confusion into the self-satisfied 
little fold of established truths. Poor Von 
Osten protested in vain : no one listened to 
him ; the verdict was given. He never re- 
covered from this official blow; he became 
the laughing-stock of all those whom he had 
at first astounded; and he died, lonely and 
embittered, on the 29th of June, 1909, at 
the age of seventy-one. 
225 



The Unknown Guest 

3 
But he left a disciple whose faith had 
not been shaken by the general defection. 
A well-to-do Elberfeld manufacturer, Herr 
Krall, had taken a great interest in Von 
Osten's labours and, during the latter years 
of the old man's life, had eagerly followed 
and even on occasion directed the education 
of the wonderful stallion. Von Osten left 
Kluge Hans to him by will; on his own 
side, Krall had bought two Arab stallions, 
Muhamed and Zarif, whose prowess soon 
surpassed that of the pioneer. The whole 
question was reopened, events took a vigor- 
ous and decisive turn and, instead of a 
weary, eccentric old man, discouraged al- 
most to sullenness and with no weapons for 
the struggle, the critics of the miracle found 
themselves faced by a new adversary, 
young and high-spirited, endowed with re- 
markable scientific instinct, quick-witted, 
scholarly and well able to defend himself. 
226 



The Unknown Guest 

His educational methods also differ ma- 
terially from Von Osten's. It was a strange 
thing, but deep down in the rather queer, 
cross-grained soul of the old enthusiast 
there had grown up gradually a sort of 
hatred for his four-legged pupil. He felt 
the stallion's proud and nervous will resist- 
ing his with an obstinacy which he qualified 
as diabolical. They stood up to each other 
like two enemies; and the lessons almost 
assumed the form of a tragic and secret 
struggle in which the animal's soul rebelled 
against man's domination. 

Krall, on the other hand, adores his 
pupils ; and this atmosphere of affection has 
in a manner of speaking humanized them. 
There are no longer those sudden move- 
ments of wild panic which reveal the ances- 
tral dread of man in the quietest and best- 
trained horse. He talks to them long and 
tenderly, as a father might talk to his chil- 
dren ; and we have the strange feeling that 
227 



The Unknown Guest 

they listen to all that he says and understand 
it. If they appear not to grasp an explana- 
tion or a demonstration, he will begin it all 
over again, analyze it, paraphrase it ten 
times in succession, with the patience of a 
mother. And so their progress has been in- 
comparably swifter and more astounding 
than that of old Hans. Within a fortnight 
of the first lesson, Muhamed did simple 
little addition- and subtraction-sums quite 
correctly. He had learnt to distinguish the 
tens from the units, striking the latter with 
his right foot and the former with his left. 
He knew the meaning of the symbols plus 
and minus. Four days later, he was begin- 
ning multiplication and division. In four 
months' time, he knew how to extract square 
and cubic roots ; and, soon after, he learnt to 
spell and read by means of the conventional 
alphabet devised by Krall. 

This alphabet, at the first glance, seems 
rather complicated. For that matter, it is 
228 



The Unknown Guest 

only a makeshift; but how could one find 
anything better? The unfortunate horse, 
who is almost voiceless, has only one way 
in which to express himself : a clumsy hoof, 
which was not created to put thought into 
words. It became necessary, therefore, to 
contrive, as in table-turning, a special alpha- 
bet, in which each letter is designated by a 
certain number of blows struck by the right 
foot and the left. Here is the copy handed 
to visitors at Elberfeld to enable them to 
follow the horse's operations: 





I 


1 


3 


4 


5 


6 


lO 


E 


N 


R 


s 


M 


c 


20 


A 


H 


L 


T 


A 


CH 


30 


I 


D 


G 


W 


J 


SCH 


40 





B 


F 


k|. 




50 
60 


u 


v 


Z 


P 


u 




EI 


AU 


EU 


X 


Q 


» 



229 



The Unknown Guest 

To mark the letter E, for instance, the 
stallion will strike one blow with his left 
foot and one with his right ; for the letter L, 
two blows with his left foot and three with 
his right ; and so on. The horses have this 
alphabet so deeply imprinted in their mem- 
ory that, practically speaking, they never 
make a mistake ; and they strike their hoofs 
so quickly, one after the other, that at first 
one has some difficulty in following them. 

MuhamedandZarif — forZarif'sprogress 
was almost equal to that of his fellow-pupil, 
though he seems a little less gifted from 
the standpoint of higher mathematics — 
Muhamed and Zarif in this way reproduce 
the words spoken in their presence, spell the 
names of their visitors, reply to questions 
put to them and sometimes make little ob- 
servations, little personal and spontaneous 
reflections to which we shall return present- 
ly. They have created for their own use an 
inconceivably fantastic and phonetic system 
230 



The Unknown Guest 

of spelling which they stubbornly refuse to 
relinquish and which often makes their 
writing rather difficult to read. Deeming 
most of the vowels useless, they keep almost 
exclusively to the consonants ; thus Zucker, 
for instance, becomes Z K R, Pferd, P F 
R T or F R T, and so on. 

I will not set forth in detail the many 
different proofs of intelligence lavished by 
the singular inhabitants of this strange 
stable. They are not only first-class cal- 
culators, for whom the most repellent frac- 
tions and roots possess hardly any secrets: 
they distinguish sounds, colours, and scents, 
read the time on the face of a watch, rec- 
ognize certain geometrical figures, like- 
nesses and photographs. 

Following on these more and more con- 
clusive experiments and especially after the 
publication of KralPs great work, Den- 
kende Tiere, a model of precision and ar- 
rangement, men's minds were faced with a 
231 



The Unknown Guest 

clear and definite problem which, this time, 
could not be challenged. Scientific commit- 
tees followed one another at Elberfeld; 
and their reports became legion. Learned 
men of every country — including Dr. Ed- 
inger, the eminent Frankfort neurologist; 
Professors Dr. H. Kraemer and H. E. 
Ziegler, of Stuttgart; Dr. Paul Sarasin, of 
Bale; Professor Ostwald, of Berlin; Pro- 
fessor A. Beredka, of the Pasteur Institute ; 
Dr. E. Clarapede, of the university of 
Geneva ; Professor Schoeller and Professor 
Gehrke, the natural philosopher, of Berlin; 
Professor Goldstein, of Darmstadt; Pro- 
fessor von Buttel-Reepen, of Oldenburg; 
Professor William Mackenzie, of Genoa; 
Professor R. Assagioli, of Florence; Dr. 
Hartkopf, of Cologne; Dr. Freudenberg, 
of Brussels; Dr. Ferrari, of Bologna, etc., 
etc., for the list is lengthening daily — came 
to study on the spot the inexplicable phe- 
nomenon which Dr. Clarapede proclaims 
232 



The Unknown Guest 

to be "the most sensational event that has 
ever happened In the psychological world." 
With the exception of two or three scep- 
tics or convinced misonelsts and of those 
who made too short a stay at Elberfeld, all 
were unanimous In recognizing that the 
facts were as stated and that the experi- 
ments were conducted with absolute fair- 
ness. Disagreement begins only when It 
becomes a matter of commenting on them, 
interpreting them and explaining them. 

4 

To complete this short preamble, It Is 
right to add that, for some time past, the 
case of the Elberfeld horses no longer 
stands quite alone. There exists at Mann- 
helm a dog of a rather doubtful breed who 
performs almost the same feats as his 
equine rivals. He is less advanced than 
they In arithmetic, but does little additions, 
subtractions and multiplications of one or 
two figures correctly. He reads and writes 

23Z 



The Unknown Guest 

by tapping with his paw, in accordance with 
an alphabet which, it appears, he has 
thought out for himself; and his spelling 
also is simplified and phoneticized to the 
utmost. He distinguishes the colours in a 
bunch of flowers, counts the money in a 
purse and separates the marks from the 
pfennigs. He knows how to seek and find 
words to define the object or the picture 
placed before him. You show him, for in- 
stance, a bouquet In a vase and ask him 
what it is. 

"A glass with little flowers," he replies. 

And his answers are often curiously 
spontaneous and original. In the course of 
a reading-exercise in which the word 
Herbst, autumn, chanced to attract atten- 
tion. Professor William Mackenzie asked 
him If he could explain what autumn was. 

"It Is the time when there are apples," 
Rolf replied. 

On the same occasion, the same profes- 
234 



The Unknown Guest 

sor, without knowing what it represented, 
held out to him a card marked with red 
and blue squares : 

"What's this?" 

*'Blue, red, lots of cubes," replied the dog. 

Sometimes his repartees are not lacking 
in humour. 

"Is there anything you would like me to 
do for you?" a lady of his acquaintance 
asked, one day. 

And Master Rolf gravely answered: 

^Wedelen,'^ which means, "Wag your 
tail!" 

Rolf, whose fame is comparatively 
young, has not yet, like his illustrious rivals 
of the Rhine Province, been the object of 
minute enquiries and copious and innumer- 
able reports. But the Incidents which I 
have just mentioned and which are vouched 
for by such men as Professor Mackenzie 
and M. Duchatel, the learned and clear- 
sighted vice-president of the Societe Uni- 
235 



The Unknown Guest 

verselle d'Etudes Psychiques,^ who went to 
Mannheim for the express purpose of 
studying them, appear to be no more con- 
trovertible than the Elberfeld occurrences, 
of which they are a sort of replica or echo. 
It is not unusual to find these coincidences 
amongst abnormal phenomena. They 
spring up simultaneously in different quar- 
ters of the globe, correspond with one an- 
other and multiply as though in obedience 
to a word of command. It is probable 
therefore that we shall see still more man- 
ifestations of the same class. One might 
almost say that a new spirit is passing over 
the world and, after awakening in man 
forces whereof he was not aware, is now 
reaching other creatures who with us in- 
habit this mysterious earth, on which they 
live, suffer and die, as we do, without know- 
ing why. 

^See the interesting lecture by M. Edmond Duchatel, 
published in the Annales des sciences psychiques, Oc- 
tober 1913. 

236 



The Unknown Guest 

5 
I have not been to Mannheim, but I 

made my pilgrimage to Elberfeld and 

stayed long enough In the town to carry 

away with me the conviction shared by all 

those who have undertaken the journey. 

A few months ago, Herr Krall, whom I 
had promised the year before that I would 
come and see his wonderful horses, was kind 
enough to repeat his invitation In a more 
pressing fashion, adding that his stable 
would perhaps be broken up after the 15th 
of September and that, in any case, he 
would be obliged, by his doctor's orders, 
to interrupt for an Indefinite period a course 
of training which he found exceedingly 
fatiguing. 

I at once left for Elberfeld, which, as 
everybody knows, is an Important manufac- 
turing-town in Rhenish Prussia and Is, in 
fact, more quaint, pleasing and picturesque 
than one might expect. I had long since 
^Z7 



The Unknown Guest 

read everything that had been published on 
the question; and I was wholly persuaded 
of the genuineness of the incidents. Indeed 
it would be difficult to have any doubts 
after the repeated and unremitting supervi- 
sion and verification to which the experi- 
ments are subjected, a supervision which is 
of the most rigorous type, often hostile and 
almost ill-mannered. As for their inter- 
pretation, I was convinced that telepathy, 
that Is to say, the transmission of thought 
from one subconsciousness to another, re- 
mained, however strange it might be in this 
new region, the only acceptable theory; and 
this in spite of certain circumstances that 
seemed plainly to exclude it. In default 
of telepathy proper, I inclined towards the 
mediumistic or subliminal theory, which 
was very ably outlined by M. de Vesmes 
in a remarkable lecture delivered, on the 
22nd of December, 19 12, before the 
Societe Universelle d'Etudes Psychiques. 
238 



The Unknown Guest 

It Is true that telepathy, especially when 
carried to its extreme limits, appeals above 
all to the subliminal forces, so that the two 
theories overlap at more than one point 
and it Is often difficult to make out where 
the first ends and the second begins. But 
this discussion will be more appropriate a 
little later. 

6 
I found Herr Krall In his goldsmlth's- 
shop, a sort of palace of Golconda, stream- 
ing and glittering with the most precious 
pearls and stones on earth. Herr Krall, 
It Is well to remember, in order to dispel 
any suspicion of pecuniary interest, is a rich 
manufacturer whose family for three gen- 
erations, from father to son, have conducted 
one of the most Important jewellery-busi- 
nesses in Germany. His researches, so far 
from bringing him the least profit, cost him 
a great deal of money, take up all his leisure 
and some part of the time which he would 
239 



The Unknown Guest 

otherwise devote to his business and, as 
usually happens, procure him from his 
fellow-citizens and from not a few scientific 
men more annoyance, unfair criticism and 
sarcasm than consideration or gratitude. 
His work is preeminently the disinterested 
and thankless task of the apostle and 
pioneer. 

For the rest, Herr Krall, though his 
faith is active, zealous and infectious, has 
nothing in common with the visionaries or 
Illuminati. He is a man of about fifty, 
vigorous, alert and enthusiastic, but at the 
same time well-balanced; accessible to every 
Idea and even to every dream, yet practical 
and methodical, with a ballast of the most 
invincible common-sense. He inspires from 
the outset that fine confidence, frank and 
unrestrained, which instantly disperses the 
instinctive doubt, the strange uneasiness and 
the veiled suspicion that generally separate 
two people who meet for the first time ; and 
240 



The Unknown Guest 

one welcomes In him, from the very depths 
of one's being, the honest man, the staunch 
friend whom one can trust and whom one 
is sorry not to have known earlier in life. 
We go together through the streets and 
along the bustling quays of Elberfeld to the 
stable, situated at a few hundred steps from 
the shop. The horses are taking the air 
outside the doors of their boxes, in the yard 
shaded by a lime-tree. There are four of 
them : Muhamed, the most intelligent, the 
most gifted of them all, the great mathe- 
matician of the party; his double, Zarif, a 
little less advanced, less tractable, craftier, 
but at the same time more fanciful, more 
spontaneous and capable of occasional dis- 
concerting sallies; next, Hdnschen, a little 
Shetland pony, hardly bigger than a New- 
foundland dog, the street-urchin of the 
band, always quivering with excitement, 
roguish, flighty, uncertain and passionate, 
but ready in a moment to work you out the 
241 



The Unknown Guest 

most difficult addition- and multiplication- 
sums with a furious scrape of the hoof; 
and lastly the latest arrival, the plump and 
placid Berto, an imposing black stallion, 
quite blind and lacking the sense of smell. 
He has been only a few months at school 
and is still, so to speak, In the preparatory 
class, but already does — a little more clums- 
ily, but more good-humouredly and con- 
scientiously — small addition- and subtrac- 
tion-sums quite as well as many a child of 
the same age. 

In a corner, Kama, a young elephant two 
or three years old, about the size of an out- 
rageously "blown" donkey, rolls his mis- 
chievous and almost knavish eyes under the 
shelter of his wide ears, each resembling a 
great rhubarb-leaf, and with his stealthy, in- 
sinuating trunk carefully picks up whatever 
he considers fit to eat, that Is to say, pretty 
well everything that lies about on the stones. 
Great things were hoped of him, but 

242 ;| 



The Unknown Guest 

hitherto he has disappointed all expecta- 
tions : he Is the dunce of the establishment. 
Perhaps he Is too young still : his little ele- 
phant-soul no doubt resembles that of a 
sucking-babe which, in the place of its feet 
and hands, plays with the stupendous nose 
that must first explore and question the uni- 
verse. It is impossible to grip his attention ; 
and, when they set out before him his al- 
phabet of movable letters, instead of nam- 
ing those which are pointed out to him he 
applies himself to pulling them off their 
stems, in order to swallow them surrepti- 
tiously. He has disheartened his kind 
master, who, pending the coming of the 
reason and wisdom promised by the pro- 
boscidian legends, leaves him in a con- 
tented state of ignorance made more bliss- 
ful by an almost insatiable appetite. 

7 
But I ask to see the great pioneer, Kluge 
Hans, Clever Hans. He is still alive. He 
243 



The Unknown Guest 

is old : he must be sixteen or seventeen ; but 
his old age, alas, Is not exempt from the 
baneful troubles from which men them- 
selves suffer In their decline ! Hans has 
turned out badly, It appears, and Is never 
mentioned save In ambiguous terms. An 
imprudent or vindictive groom, I forget 
which, having introduced a mare Into the 
yard, Hans the Pure, who till then had led 
an austere and monkish existence, vowed 
to celibacy, science and the chaste delights 
of figures, Hans the Irreproachable Incon- 
tinently lost his head and cut himself open 
on the hanging-rail of his stall. They had 
to force back his Intestines and sew up his 
belly. He is now rusticating miserably in 
a meadow outside the town. So true it is 
that a life cannot be judged except at Its 
close and that we are sure of nothing until 
we are dead. 

8 
Before the sitting begins, while the 
244 



The Unknown Guest 

master is making his morning inspection, I 
go up to Muhamed, speak to him and pat 
him, looking straight into his eyes mean- 
while in order to catch a sign of his genius. 
The handsome creature, well-bred and in 
hard condition, is as calm and trusting as 
a dog; he shows himself excessively gra- 
cious and friendly and tries to give me some 
huge licks and mighty kisses which I do my 
best to avoid because they are a little un- 
expected and overdemonstrative. The ex- 
pression of his limpid antelope-eyes is deep, 
serious and remote, but It differs in no wise 
from that of his brothers who, for thou- 
sands of years, have seen nothing but 
brutality and Ingratitude in man. If we 
were able to read anything there, it would 
not be that insufficient and vain little effort 
which we call thought, but rather an inde- 
finable, vast anxiety, a tear-dimmed regret 
for the boundless, stream-crossed plains 
where his sires sported at will before they 
245 



The Unknown Guest 

knew man's yoke. In any case, to see him 
thus fastened by a halter to the stable-door, 
beating off the flies and absently pawing the 
cobbles, Muhamed is nothing more than a 
well-trained horse who seems to be waiting 
for his saddle or harness and who hides his 
new secret as profoundly as all the others 
which nature has buried in him. 



But they are summoning me to take my 
place in the stable where the lessons are 
given. It is a small room, empty and bare, 
with peat-moss litter bedding and white- 
washed walls. The horse is separated from 
the people present by breast-high wooden 
partitions. Opposite the four-legged 
scholar is a black-board, nailed to the wall ; 
and on one side a corn-bin which forms a 
seat for the spectators. Muhamed is led 
in. Krall, who is a little nervous, makes 
no secret of his uneasiness. His horses are 
246 



The Unknown Guest 

fickle animals, uncertain, capricious and ex- 
tremely sensitive. A trifle disturbs them, 
confuses them, puts them off. At such 
times, threats, prayers and even the irre- 
sistible charm of carrots and good rye-bread 
are useless. They obstinately refuse to do 
any work and they answer at random. 
Everything depends on a whim, the state of 
the weather, the morning meal or the im- 
pression which the visitor makes upon them. 
Still, Krall seems to know, by certain im- 
perceptible signs, that this is not going to 
be a bad day. Muhamed quivers with ex- 
citement, snorts loudly through his nostrils, 
utters a series of indistinct little whinnyings : 
excellent symptoms, it appears. I take my 
seat on the corn-bin. The master, stand- 
ing beside the black-board, chalk in hand, 
introduces me to Muhamed in due form, 
as to a human being: 

^'Muhamed, attention! This is your 
uncle" — pointing to me — *Vho has come 
247 



The Unknown Guest 

all the way to honour you with a visit. 
Mind you don't disappoint him. His name 
is Maeterlinck." Krall pronounces the 
first syllable German-fashion: Mah. "You 
understand: Maeterlinck. Now show him 
that you know your letters and that you can 
spell a name correctly, like a clever boy. 
Go ahead, we're listening." . 

Muhamed gives a short neigh and, on 
the small, movable board at his feet, strikes 
first wath his right hoof and then with his 
left the number of blows which correspond 
with the letter M in the conventional al- 
phabet used by the horses. Then, one after 
the other, without stopping or hesitating, he 
marks the letters ADRLINSH, rep- 
resenting the unexpected aspect which my 
humble name assumes in the equine mind 
and phonetics. His attention is called to 
the fact that there is a mistake. He read- 
ily agrees and replaces the S H by a G 
and then the G by a K. They insist that 
248 



The Unknown Guest 

he must put a T instead of the D; but 
Muhamed, content with his work, shakes 
his head to say no and refuses to make 
any further corrections. 

lO 

I assure you that the first shock is rather 
disturbing, however much one expected it. 
I am quite aware that, when one describes 
these things, one is taken for a dupe too 
readily dazzled by the doubtless childish 
illusion of an ingeniously-contrived scene. 
But what contrivances, what illusions have 
we here? Do they lie in the spoken word? 
Why, to admit that the horse understands 
and translates his master's words is just to 
accept the most extraordinary part of the 
phenomenon ! Is it a case of surreptitious 
touches or conventional signs? However 
simple-minded one may be, one would 
nevertheless notice them more easily than 
a horse, even a horse of genius. Krall 
249 



The Unknown Guest 

never lays a hand on the animal; he moves 
all round the little stable, which contains 
no appliances of any sort ; for the most part, 
he stands behind the horse, which is un- 
able to see him, or comes and sits beside 
his guest on the innocuous corn-bin, busying 
himself, while lecturing his pupil, in writ- 
ing up the minutes of the lesson. He also 
welcomes with the most serene readiness 
any restrictions or tests which you propose. 
I assure you that the thing itself is much 
simpler and clearer than the suspicions of 
the arm-chair critics and that the most dis- 
trustful mind would not entertain the faint- 
est idea of fraud in the frank, wholesome 
atmosphere of the old stable. 

"But," some one might have said, 
"Krall, who knew that you were coming 
to Elberfeld, had of course thoroughly re- 
hearsed his little exercise in spelling, which 
apparently is only an exercise in memory." 

For conscience' sake, though I did not 
250 



The Unknown Guest 

look upon the objection as serious, I sub- 
mitted it to Krall, who at once said: 

"Try it for yourself. Dictate to the 
horse any German word of two or three 
syllables, emphasizing it strongly. I'll go 
out of the stable and leave you alone with 
him." 

Behold Muhamed and me by ourselves. 
I confess that I am a little frightened. I 
have many a time felt less uncomfortable in 
the presence of the great ones or the kings 
of the earth. Whom am I dealing with 
exactly? However, I summon my courage 
and speak aloud the first word that occurs 
to me, the name of the hotel at which I am 
staying : Weidenhof . At first, Muhamed, 
who seems a little puzzled by his master's 
absence, appears not to hear me and does 
not even deign to notice that I am there. 
But I repeat eagerly, in varying tones of 
voice, by turns insinuating, threatening, be- 
seeching and commanding : 
251 



The Unknown Guest 

"Weidenhof! Weidenhof! Weiden- 
hof!" 

At last, my mysterious companion sud- 
denly makes up his mind to lend me his 
ears and straightway blithely raps out the 
following letters, which I write down on 
the black-board as they come : 

W E I D N H O Z. 

It is a magnificent specimen of equine 
spelling! Triumphant and bewildered, I 
call in friend Krall, who, accustomed as he 
is to the prodigy, thinks it quite natural, 
but knits his brows: 

"What's this, Muhamed? YouVe made 
a mistake again. It's an F you want at the 
end of the word, not a Z. Just correct it 
at once, please." 

And the docile Muhamed, recognizing 
his blunder, gives the three blows with his 
right hoof, followed by the four blows with 

2S2 



The Unknown Guest 

his left, which represent the most unexcep- 
tionable F that one could ask for. 

Observe, by the way, the logic of his 
phonetic writing: contrary to his habit, he 
strikes the mute E after the W, because it 
is indispensable; but, finding it included in 
the D, he considers it superfluous and sup- 
presses it with a high hand. 

You rub your eyes, question yourself, ask 
yourself in the presence of what humanized 
phenomenon, of what unknown force, of 
what new creature you stand. Was all this 
w^hat they hid in their eyes, those silent 
brothers of ours ? You blush at man's long 
injustice. You look around you for some 
sort of trace, obvious or subtle, of the mys- 
tery. You feel yourself attacked in your 
innermost citadel, where you held yourself 
most certain and most impregnable. You 
have felt a breath from the abyss upon your 
face. You would not be more astonished 
if you suddenly heard the voice of the dead. 
253 



The Unknown Guest 

But the most astonishing thing is that you 
are not astonished for long. We all, un- 
known to ourselves, live in the expectation 
of the extraordinary; and, when it comes, 
it moves us much less than did the expecta- 
tion. It is as though a sort of higher in- 
stinct, which knows everything and is not 
ignorant of the miracles that hang over our 
heads, were reassuring us in advance and 
helping us to make an easy entrance into 
the regions of the supernatural. There is 
nothing to which we grow accustomed more 
readily than to the marvellous; and it is 
only afterwards, upon reflection, that our 
intelligence, which knows hardly anything, 
appreciates the magnitude of certain phe- 
nomena. 

II 
But Muhamed gives unmistakable signs 
of impatience to show that he has had 
enough of spelling. Thereupon, as a diver- 
sion and a reward, his kind master suggests 
254 



The Unknown Guest 

the extraction of a few square and cubic 
roots. Muhamed appears delighted: these 
are his favourite problems ; for he takes less 
Interest than formerly In the most difficult 
multiplications and divisions. He doubtless 
thinks them beneath him. 

Krall therefore writes on the black- 
board various numbers of which I did not 
take note. Moreover, as nobody now con- 
tests the fact that the horse works them 
with ease, It would hardly be Interesting to 
reproduce here several rather grim prob- 
lems of which numerous variants will be 
found in the accounts and reports of experi- 
ments signed by Drs. Mackenzie and 
Hartkopff, by Overbeck, Clarapede and 
many others. What strikes one particu- 
larly Is the facility, the quickness, I was 
almost saying the joyous carelessness with 
which the strange mathematician gives the 
answers. The last figure is hardly chalked 
upon the board before the right hoof Is 
255 



The Unknown Guest 

striking off the units, followed immediately 
by the left hoof marking the tens. There 
is not a sign of attention or reflection; one 
is not even aware of the exact moment at 
which the horse looks at the problem ; and 
the answer seems to spring automatically 
from an invisible intelligence. Mistakes 
are rare or frequent according as it hap- 
pens to be a good or bad day with the 
horse; but, when he is told of them, he 
nearly always corrects them. Not unsel- 
dom, the number is reversed: 47, for in- 
stance, becomes 74; but he puts it right 
without demur when asked. 

I am manifestly dumbfounded; but per- 
haps these problems are prepared before- 
hand? If they were, it would be very ex- 
traordinary, but yet less surprising than 
their actual solution. Krall does not read 
this suspicion in my eyes, because they do 
not show it; nevertheless, to remove the 
least shade of it, he asks me to write a 
256 



The Unknown Guest 

number of my own on the black-board for 
the horse to find the root. 

I must here confess the humiliating ig- 
norance that is the disgrace of my life. I 
have not the faintest idea of the mysteries 
concealed within those recondite and com- 
plicated operations. I did my humanities 
like everybody else; but, after crossing the 
useful and familiar frontiers of multiplica- 
tion and division I found it Impossible to 
advance any farther into the desolate re- 
gions, bristling with figures, where the 
square and cubic roots hold sway, together 
with all sorts of other monstrous powers, 
without shapes or faces, which Inspired me 
with invincible terror. All the persecutions 
of my excellent instructors wore themselves 
out against a dead wall of stolidity. Suc- 
cessively disheartened, they left me to my 
dismal ignorance, prophesying a most dreary 
future for me, haunted with bitter regrets. 
I must say that, until now, I had scarcely 
257 



The Unknown Guest 

experienced the effects of these gloomy 
predictions; but the hour has come for me 
to expiate the sins of my youth. Never- 
theless, I put a good face upon it ; and, tak- 
ing at random the first figures that suggest 
themselves to my mind, I boldly write on 
the black-board an enormous and most dar- 
ing number. Muhamed remains motion- 
less. Krall speaks to him sharply, telling 
him to hurry up. Muhamed lifts his right 
hoof, but does not let it fall. Krall loses 
patience, lavishes prayers, promises and 
threats; the hoof remains poised, as 
though to bear witness to good intentions 
that cannot be carried out. Then my host 
turns round, looks at the problem and asks 
me: 

"Does It give an exact root?" 

Exact ? What does he mean ? Are there 

roots which . . . ? But I dare not go on : 

my shameful ignorance suddenly flashes 

before my eyes. Krall smiles indulgently 

2S8 



The Unknown Guest 

and, without making any attempt to sup- 
plement an education which is too much in 
arrears to allow of the slightest hope, 
laboriously works out the problem and 
declares that the horse was right in refus- 
ing to give an impossible solution. 

12 

Muhamed receives our thanks In the 
form of a lordly portion of carrots; and 
a pupil Is Introduced whose attainments do 
not tower so high above mine: Hanschen, 
the little pony, quick and lively as a big 
rat. Like me, he has never gone beyond 
elementary arithmetic; and so we shall un- 
derstand each other better and meet on 
equal terms. 

Krall asks me for two numbers to mul- 
tiply. I give him 63 X 7- He does the 
sum and writes the product on the board, 
followed by the sign of division: 441 -^7. 
Instantly Hanschen, with a celerity difficult 
259 



The Unknown Guest 

to follow, gives three blows, or rather three 
violent scrapes with his right hoof and six 
with his left, which makes 61,^ for we must 
not forget that in German they say not 
sixty-three, but three-and-sixty. We con- 
gratulate him; and, to evince his satisfac- 
tion, he nimbly reverses the number by 
marking 36 and then puts it right again by 
scraping 63. He is evidently enjoying 
himself and juggling with the figures. And 
additions, subtractions, multiplications and 
divisions follow one after the other, with 
figures supplied by myself, so as to remove 
any idea of collusion. Hanschen seldom 
blunders; and, when he does, we receive a 
very clear impression that his mistake is 
voluntary-: he is like a mischievous school- 
boy playing a practical joke upon his mas- 
ter. The solutions fall thick as hail upon 
the little spring-board; the correct answer is 
released by the question as though you were 
pressing the button of an electric push. The 
260 



The Unknown Guest 

pony's flippancy is as surprising as his skill. 
But in this unruly flippancy, in this hasti- 
ness which seems inattentive there is never- 
theless a fixed and permanent idea. Han- 
schen paws the ground, kicks, prances, 
tosses his head, looks as if he cannot keep 
still, but never leaves his spring-board. Is 
he interested in the problems, does he en- 
joy them? It is impossible to say; but he 
certainly has the appearance of one accom- 
plishing a duty or a piece of work which 
we do not discuss, which is important, neces- 
sary and inevitable. 

But the lesson suddenly ends with a joke 
carried rather too far by the pupil, who 
catches his good master by the seat of his 
trousers, into which he plants disrespectful 
teeth. He is severely reprimanded, de- 
prived of his carrots and sent back in dis- 
grace to his private apartments. 

13 
Next comes Berto, who is like a big, sleek 
261 



The Unknown Guest 

Norman horse. He makes the calm, digni- 
fied, peaceful entrance of a blind giant. His 
large, dark, brilliant eyes are quite dead, de- 
prived of any reflex power. He feels about 
with his hoof for the board on which he is 
to rap his answers. He has not yet gone 
beyond the rudiments of mathematics ; and 
the early part of his education was particu- 
larly difficult. They managed to make him 
understand the value and meaning of the 
numbers and of the addition- and multipli- 
cation-signs by means of little taps on his 
sides. Krall speaks to him as a father 
might speak to the youngest of his sons. 
He explains to him fondly the easy sums 
which I suggest his doing : two plus three, 
eight minus four, four times three ; he says : 

"Mind! It's not plus three or minus 
three this time, but four multiplied by 
three!'' 

Berto hardly ever makes a mistake. 
When he does not understand the question, 
262 



The Unknown Guest 

he waits for it to be written with the finger 
on his side; and the careful way in which 
he works it out hke some backward and 
afflicted child is an infinitely pathetic sight. 
He is much more zealous and conscientious 
than his fellow-pupils ; and we feel that, in 
the darkness wherein he dwells, this work 
is, next to his meals, the only spark of light 
and interest in his existence. He will cer- 
tainly never rival Muhamed, for Instance, 
who is the arithmetical prodigy, the Inaudi, 
of horses; but he is a valuable and living 
proof that the theory of unconscious and 
imperceptible signs, the only one which the 
German theorists have hitherto seriously 
considered, is now clearly untenable. 

I have not yet spoken of Zarif. He Is 
not in the best of tempers; and besides, in 
arithmetic, he is only a less learned and 
more capricious Muhamed. He answers 
most of the questions at random, stubbornly 
raising his foot and declining to lower It, so 
263 



The Unknown Guest 

as clearly to mark his disapproval; but he 
solves the last problem correctly when he is 
promised a panful of carrots and no more 
lessons for that morning. The groom en- 
ters to lead him away and makes some 
movement or other at w^hich the horse 
starts, rears and shies. 

"That's his bad conscience," says Krall, 
gravely. 

And the expression assum.es a singular 
meaning and importance in this hybrid at- 
mosphere, steeped in an indefinable some- 
thing from another world. 

But it is half-past one, the sacred Ger- 
man dinner-hour. The horses are taken 
back to their racks and the men separate, 
wishing one another the inevitable Mahl- 
zeit. 

As he w^alks with me along the quays of 
the black and muddy Wupper, Krall says : 

"It is a pity that you did not see Zarif in 
one of his better moods. He is sometimes 
264 



The Unknown Guest 

more startling than Muhamed and has 
given me two or three surprises that seem 
incredible. One morning, for instance, I 
came to the stable and was preparing to 
give him his lesson in arithmetic. He was 
no sooner in front of the spring-board than 
he began to stamp with his foot. I left him 
alone and was astounded to hear a whole 
sentence, an absolutely human sentence, 
come letter by letter from his hoof : 'Albert 
has beaten Hanschen,' was what he said 
to me that day. Another time, I wrote 
down from his dictation, 'Hanschen has 
bitten Kama.' Like a child seeing its 
father after an absence, he felt the need to 
inform me of the little doings of the 
stable; he provided me with the artless 
chronicle of a humble and uneventful life." 
Krall, for that matter, living in the midst 
of his miracle, seems to think this quite 
natural and almost inevitable. I, who have 
been immersed in it for only a few hours, 
265 



The Unknown Guest 

accept it almost as calmly as he does. I 
believe without hesitation what he tells 
me; and, in the presence of this phenome- 
non which, for the first time in man's exist- 
ence, gives us a sentence that has not 
sprung from a human brain, I ask myself 
w^hither we are tending, where we stand and 
what lies ahead of us. . . . 

i\fter dinner, the experiments begin 
again, for my host is untiring. First of all, 
pointing to me, he asks Muhamed if he re- 
mem.bers what his uncle's name is. The 
horse raps out an H. Krall is astonished 
and utters fatherly reprimands : 

"Come, take care! You know it's not 
an H." 

The horse raps out an E. Krall becomes 

a little impatient : he threatens, he implores, 

he promises in turns carrots and the direst 

punishments, such as sending for Albert, 

266 



The Unknown Guest 

the groom, who, on special occasions, recalls 
idle and inattentive pupils to a sense of 
duty and decorum, for Krall himself never 
chastises his horses, lest he should lose their 
friendship or their confidence. So he con- 
tinues his reproaches: 

"Come now, are you going to be more 
careful and not rap out your letters any- 
how?" 

Muhamed obstinately goes his own way 
and strikes an R. Then Krall's open face 
lights up : 

"He's right," he says. "You under- 
stand: HER, standing for Herr. He 
wanted to give you the title to which every 
man wearing a top hat or a bowler has the 
right. He does it only very rarely and I 
had forgotten all about it. He probably 
heard me call you Herr Maeterlinck and 
wanted to get it perfectly. This special 
politeness and this excess of zeal augur a 
particularly good lesson. YouVe done very 
267 



The Unknown Guest 

well, Muhamed, my child ; you've done very 
well and I beg your pardon. Now kiss me 
and go on." 

But Muhamed, after giving his master a 
hearty kiss, still seems to be hesitating. 
Then Krall, to put him on the right track, 
observes that the first letter of mxy name is 
the same as the first letter of his own. 
Muhamed strikes a K, evidently thinking 
of his master's name. At last, Krall draws 
a big M on the black-board, whereupon the 
horse, like one suddenly remembering a 
word which he could not think of, raps out, 
one after the other and without stopping, 
the letters M A Z R L K, which, stripped 
of useless vowels, represent the curious cor- 
ruption which my name has undergone, 
since the morning, in a brain that is not a 
human brain. He is told that this is not 
correct. He seems to agree, gropes about 
a little and writes, MARZLEGK. 
Krall repeats my name and asks which is 
268 



The Unknown Guest 

the first letter to be altered. The stallion 
marks an R. 

*'Good, but what letter will you put in- 
stead?" 

Muhamed strikes an N. 

^'No, do be careful!" 

He strikes a T. 

"Very good, but in what place will the 
T come?" 

"In the third," replies the horse; and 
the corrections continue until my patrony- 
mic comes out of its strange adventure al- 
most unscathed. 

And the spelling, the questioning, the 
sums, the problems are resumed and follow 
upon one another, as wonderful, as be- 
wildering as before, but already a little 
dimmed by familiarity, like any other pro- 
longed miracle. It is important, besides, 
to notice that the instances which I have 
given are not to be classed among the most 
269 



The Unknown Guest 

remarkable feats of our magic horses. To- 
day's Is a good ordinary lesson, a respect- 
able lesson, not illumined by flashes of 
genius. But in the presence of other wit- 
nesses the horses performed more start- 
ling exploits which broke down even more 
decisively the barrier, which is undoubtedly 
an imaginary one, between animal and hu- 
man nature. One day, for instance, Zarif, 
the scamp of the party, suddenly stopped 
in the middle of his lesson. They asked 
him the reason. 

"Because I am tired." 

Another time, he answered: 

"Pain in my leg." 

They recognize and identify pictures 
shown to them, distinguish colours and 
scents. I have made a point of stating only 
what I saw with my own eyes and heard 
with my own ears; and I declare that I 
have done so with the same scrupulous ac- 
curacy as though I were reporting a crim- 
270 



The Unknown Guest 

inal trial in which a man's life depended 
on my evidence. 

But I was practically convinced of the 
truth of the incidents before going to Elber- 
feld; and it was not to check them that I 
made the journey. I was anxious to make 
certain if the telepathic theory, which was 
the only one that I considered admissible, 
would withstand the tests which I intended 
to apply to it. I opened my mind on the 
subject to Krall, who at first did not quite 
grasp what I was asking. Like most men 
who have not made a special study of these 
questions, he imagined that telepathy meant 
above all a deliberate and conscious trans- 
mission of thought ; and he assured me that 
he never made any effort to transmit his 
and that, for the most part, the horses gave 
a reply which was the exact opposite of 
what he was expecting. I did not doubt 
this for a moment; in fact, direct and de- 
liberate transmission of thought is, even 



The Unknown Guest 

among men, a very rare, difficult and un- 
certain phenomenon, whereas involuntary, 
unpremeditated and unsuspected communi- 
cations between one subconsciousness and 
another can no longer be denied except by 
those who of set purpose ignore studies and 
experiments that are within the reach of 
any one who will take the trouble to en- 
gage in them. I was persuaded therefore 
that the horses acted exactly like the 
"tipping-tables" which simply translate the 
subliminal ideas of one or other of those 
present by the aid of conventional little 
taps. When all is said, it is much less sur- 
prising to see a horse than a table lift its 
foot and much more natural that the liv- 
ing substance of an animal rather than the 
inert matter of a thing should be sensitive 
and susceptible to the mysterious influence 
of a medium. I knew quite well that ex- 
periments had been made in order to elim- 
inate this theory. People, for instance, pre- 
272 



The Unknown Guest 

pared a certain number of questions and 
placed them in sealed envelopes. Then, on 
entering the presence of the horse, they 
would take one of the envelopes at ran- 
dom, open it and write down the problem 
on the black-board; and Muhamed or 
Zarif would answer with the same facility 
and the same readiness as though the solu- 
tion had been known to all the onlookers. 
But was it really unknown to their subcon- 
sciousness? Who could say for certain? 
Tests of this kind require extraordinary 
precautions and a special dexterity; for the 
action of the subconsciousness is so subtle, 
takes such unexpected turns, delves in the 
museum of so many forgotten treasures 
and operates at such distances that one is 
never sure of escaping it. Were those pre- 
cautions taken? I was not convinced that 
they were; and, without pretending to de- 
cide the question, I said to myself that my 
blissful ignorance of mathematics might 
273 



The Unknown Guest 

perhaps be of service in shedding light upon 
some part of it. 

For this ignorance, however deplorable 
from other points of view, gave me a rare 
advantage in this case. It was in fact ex- 
tremely unlikely that my subliminal con- 
sciousness, which had never known what a 
cubic root was or the root of any other 
power, could help the horse. I therefore 
took from a table a list containing several 
problems, all different and all equally un- 
pleasant-looking, covered up the solutions, 
asked Krall to leave the stable and, when 
alone with Zarif, copied out one of them 
on the black-board. In order not to over- 
load these pages with details which would 
only be a repetition of one another, I will 
at once say that none of the antitelepathic 
tests succeeded that day. It was the end of 
the lesson and late in the afternoon; the 
horses were tired and irritable ; and, whether 
Krall was there or not, whether the problem 
274 



The Unknown Guest 

was elementary or difficult, they gave only 
absurd replies, wilfully "putting their foot 
in it," as one might say with very good 
reason. But, next morning, on resuming 
their task, when I proceeded as described 
above, Muhamed and Zarif, doubtless in 
a better temper and already more accus- 
tomed to their new examiner, gave in rapid 
succession correct answers to nearly every 
problem set them. I am bound in fairness 
to say that there was no appreciable differ- 
ence between these results and those which 
are obtained in the presence of Krall or 
other onlookers who, consciously or uncon- 
sciously, are already aware of the answer 
required. 

I next thought of another and much sim- 
pler test, but one which, by virtue of its 
very simplicity, could not be exposed to any 
elaborate and far-fetched suspicions. I saw 
on one of the shelves in the stable a parcel 
of cards, about the size of an octavo volume, 
275 



The Unknown Guest 

each bearing an arable numeral on one of its 
sides. I once more asked my good friend 
Krall, whose courtesy is inexhaustible, to 
leave me alone with his pupil. I then 
shuffled the cards and put three of them in 
a row on the spring-board in front of the 
horse, without looking at them myself. 
There was therefore, at that moment, not a 
human soul on earth who knew the figures 
spread at the feet of my companion, this 
creature so full of mystery that already I 
no longer dare call him an animal. Without 
hesitation and unasked, he rapped out cor- 
rectly the number formed by the cards. The 
experiment succeeded, as often as I cared 
to try it, with Hanschen, Muhamed and 
Zarif alike. Muhamed did even more : as 
each figure was of a different colour, I asked 
him to tell me the colour — of which I my- 
self was absolutely ignorant — of the first 
letter on the right. With the aid of the con- 
ventional alphabet, he replied that it was 
276 



The Unknown Guest 

blue, which proved to be the case. Of 
course, I ought to have multiplied these 
experiments and made them more exhaus- 
tive and complicated by combining, with 
the aid of the cards and under the same con- 
ditions, exercises in multiplication, division 
and the extracting of roots. I had not the 
time; but, a few days after I left, the sub- 
ject was resumed and completed by Dr. H. 
Hamel. I will sum up his report of the 
experiments : the doctor, alone in the stable 
with the horse (Krall was away, travel- 
ling), puts down on the black-board the 
sign + and then places before and after 
this sign, without looking at either of them, 
a card marked with a figure which he does 
not know. He next asks Muhamed to add 
up the two numbers. Muhamed at first 
gives a few heedless taps with his hoof. He 
is called to order and requested to be seri- 
ous and to attend. He then gives fifteen 
distinct taps. The doctor next replaces the 
277 



The Unknown Guest 

sign + by X and, again without looking 
at them, places two cards on the black- 
board and asks the horse not to add up the 
two figures this time, but to multiply them. 
Muhamed taps out, "27," which is right, 
for the black-board says, "9 X 3.'' The 
same success follows with other multiplica- 
tion-sums: 9 X 2, 8 X 6. Then the doctor 
takes from an envelope a problem of which 
he does not know the solution : /^'j 8 90481. 
Muhamed replies, "53." The doctor looks 
at the back of the paper: once more, the 
answer is perfectly correct. 

16 

Does this mean that every risk of 
telepathy is done away with? It would 
perhaps be rash to make a categorical as- 
sertion. The power and extent of telepathy 
are as yet, we cannot too often repeat, In- 
definite, indiscernible, untraceable and un- 
limited. We have but quite lately discov- 
278 



The Unknown Guest 

ered It, we know only that its existence can 
no longer be denied; but, as for all the rest, 
we are at much the same stage as that 
whereat GalvanI was when he gave life 
to the muscles of his dead frogs with two 
little plates of metal which roused the 
jeers of the scientists of his time, but con- 
tained the germ of all the wonders of elec- 
tricity. 

Nevertheless, as regards telepathy In the 
sense In which we understand and know It 
to-day, my mind Is made up. I am per- 
suaded that It Is not In this direction that we 
must seek for an explanation of the phe- 
nomenon; or, If we are determined to find 
it there, the explanation becomes compli- 
cated with so many subsidiary mysteries 
that It Is better to accept the prodigy as It 
stands, In Its original obscurity and sim- 
plicity. When, for Instance, I was copying 
out one of the grisly problems which I have 
mentioned, It Is quite certain that my con- 
279 



The Unknown Guest 

scious intelligence could make neither head 
nor tail of it. I did not so much as know 
what it meant or whether the exponent 
3.4.5 called for a multiplication, a divi- 
sion or some other mathematical operation 
which I did not even try to imagine; and, 
rack my memory as I may, I cannot remem- 
ber any moment in my life when I knew 
more about it than I do now. We should 
therefore have to admit that my subliminal 
self is a born mathematician, quick, infal- 
lible and endowed with boundless learning. 
It is possible and I fell a certain pride at 
the thought. But the theory simply shifts 
the miracle by making it pass from the 
horse's soul to mine; and the miracle be- 
comes no clearer by the transfer, which, for 
that matter, does not sound probable. I 
need hardly add that, a fortiori^ Dr. 
Hamel's experiments and many others 
which I have not here the space to describe 
finally dispose of the theory. 
280 



The Unknown Guest 

17 

Let us see how those who have inter- 
ested themselves in these extraordinary 
manifestations have attempted to explain 
them. 

As we go along, we will just shear 
through the feeble undergrowth of childish 
theories. I shall not, therefore, linger over 
the suggestions of cheating, of manifest 
signs addressed to the eye or ear, of elec- 
trical installations that are supposed to 
control the answers, nor other idle tales of 
an excessively clumsy character. To realize 
their inexcusable inanity we have but to 
spend a few minutes in the honest Elber- 
feld stable. 

At the beginning of this essay, I men- 
tioned the attack made by Herr Pfungst. 
Herr Pfungst, the reader will remember, 
claims to prove that all the horse's replies 
are determined by imperceptible and prob- 
ably unconscious movement on the part of 
281 



The Unknown Guest 

the person putting the questions. This in- 
terpretation, which falls to the ground, 
like all the others, in the face of the actual 
facts, would not deserve serious discussion, 
were it not that the Berlin psychologist's 
report created an immense sensation some 
years ago and has succeeded in intimidating 
the greater part of the official German 
scientific world to this day. It is true that 
the report in question is a monument of use- 
less pedantry, but we are none the less 
bound to admit that, such as it was, it an- 
nihilated poor Von Osten, who, being no 
controversialist and not knowing how to 
proclaim the truth which was struggling 
for utterance, died in gloom and solitude. 

To make an end of this cumbrous and 
puerile theory, is it necessary to emphasize 
again that experiments in which the animal 
does not see the questioner are as regularly 
successful as the others? Krall, if you ask 
him, will stand behind the horse, will speak 
282 



The Unknown Guest 

from the end of the room, will leave the 
stable altogether; and the results are just 
the same. They are the same again when 
the tests are made in the dark or when 
the animal's head is covered with a close- 
fitting hood. They do not vary either in 
the case of Berto, who is stone-blind, or 
when any other person whatever sets the 
problem in Krall's absence. Will it be 
maintained that this outsider or that 
stranger is acquainted beforehand with the 
imperceptible signs that are to dictate the 
solution which he himself often does not 
know? 

But what Is the use of prolonging this 
fight against a cloud of smoke? None of 
it can bear examination; and It calls for a 
genuine effort of the will to set one's self 
seriously to refute such pitiful objections. 

i8 

On the ground thus cleared and at the 
283 



The Unknown Guest 

portal of this unlooked-for riddle, which 
comes to disturb our peace in a region 
which we thought to be finally explored and 
conquered, there are only two ways, if not 
of explaining, at least of contemplating the 
phenomenon: to admit purely and simply 
the almost human intelligence of the horse, 
or to have recourse to an as yet very vague 
and indefinite theory which, for lack of a 
better designation, we will call the medium- 
istic or subliminal theory and of which we 
will strive presently — and no doubt vainly 
— to dispel the grosser darkness. But, 
whatever interpretation we adopt, we are 
bound to recognize that it plunges us into 
a mystery which is equally profound and 
equally astonishing on either side, one 
directly related to the greatest mysteries 
that overwhelm us; and it is open to us to 
accept it with resignation or rejoicing, ac- 
cording as we prefer to live in a world 
wherein everything is within the reach of 
284 



The Unknown Guest 

our intelligence or a world wherein every- 
thing is incomprehensible. 

As for Krall, he does not doubt for an 
instant that his horses solve for them- 
selves, without any assistance, without any 
outside influence, simply by their own men- 
tal powers, the most arduous problems set 
them. He is persuaded that they under- 
stand what is said to them and what they 
say, in short, that their brain and their 
will perform exactly the same functions as 
a human brain and will. It is certain that 
the facts seem to prove him right and that 
his opinion carries very great weight, for, 
after all, he knows his horses better than 
any one does; he has beheld the birth or 
rather the awakening of that dormant in- 
telligence, even as a mother beholds the 
birth or the awakening of intelligence in 
her child; he has perceived its first grop- 
ings, known its first resistance and its first 
triumphs; he has watched it taking shape, 
285 



The Unknown Guest 

breaking away and gradually rising to the 
point at which it stands to-day; in a word, 
he is the father and the principal and sole 
perpetual witness of the miracle. 

19 

Yes, but the miracle comes as such a sur- 
prise that, the moment we set foot in it, a 
sort of instinctive aberration seizes us, re- 
fusing to accept the evidence and com- 
pelling us to search in every direction to 
see if there is not another outlet. Even in 
the presence of those astounding horses and 
while they are working before our eyes, 
we do not yet sincerely believe that which 
fills and subdues our gaze. We accept the 
facts, because there is no means of escap- 
ing them; but we accept them only provi- 
sionally and with all reserve, putting off 
till later the comfortable explanation which 
will give us back our familiar, shallow cer- 
tainties. But the explanation does not 
286 



The Unknown Guest 

come; there is none in the homely and not 
very lofty regions wherein we hoped to find 
one; there is neither fault nor flaw in the 
mighty evidence; and nothing delivers us 
from the mystery. 

It must be confessed that this mystery, 
springing from a point where we least ex- 
pected to come upon the unknown, bears 
enough within itself to scatter all our con- 
victions. Remember that, since man ap- 
peared upon this earth, he has lived among 
creatures which, from immemorial experi- 
ence, he thought that he knew as perfectly 
as he knows an object fashioned by his 
hands. Out of these creatures he chose the 
most docile and, as he called them, the most 
intelligent, attaching in this case to the word 
intelligence a sense so narrow as to be al- 
most ridiculous. He observed them, scruti- 
nized them, tried them, analyzed them and 
dissected them in every imaginable way; 
and whole lives were devoted to nothing 



The Unknown Guest 

but the study of their habits, their facul- 
ties, their nervous system, their pathology, 
their psychology, their instincts. All this 
led to certainties which, among those sup- 
ported by our unexplained little existence 
on an inexplicable planet, would seem to be 
the least doubtful, the least subject to re- 
vision. There is no disputing, for instance, 
that the horse is gifted with an extraordi- 
nary mem.ory, that he possesses the sense 
of direction, that he understands a few 
signs and even a few words and that he 
obeys them. It is equally undeniable that 
the anthropoid apes are capable of imitat- 
ing a great number of our actions and of 
our attitudes; but it is also manifest that 
their bewildered and feverish imagination 
perceives neither their object nor their 
scope. As for the dog, the one of all these 
privileged animals who lives closest to us, 
who for thousands and thousands of years 
has eaten at our table and worked with us 



The Unknown Guest 

and been our friend, it is manifest that, now 
and then, we catch a rather uncanny gleam 
in his deep, watchful eyes. It is certain 
that he sometimes wanders in a curious 
fashion along the mysterious border that 
separates our own intelligence from that 
which we grant to the other creatures in- 
habiting this earth with us. But it is no 
less certain that he has never definitely 
passed it. We know exactly how far he can 
go ; and we have Invariably found that our 
efforts, our patience, our encouragement, 
our passionate appeals have hitherto failed 
to draw him out of the somewhat narrow, 
darkly enchanted circle wherein nature 
seems to have imprisoned him once and 
for all. 

20 

There remains, it Is true, the Insect- 
world, in which marvellous things happen. 
It Includes architects, geometricians, mech- 
anicians, engineers, weavers, physicists, 
289 



The Unknown Guest 

chemists and surgeons who have forestalled 
most of our human inventions. I need not 
here remind the reader of the wasps' and 
bees' genius for building, the social and eco- 
nomic organization of the hive and the 
ant-hill, the spider's snares, the eumenes' 
nest and hanging egg, the odynerus' cell 
with its neat stacks of game, the sacred 
beetle's filthy but ingenius ball, the leaf- 
cutter's faultless disks, the brick-laying of 
the mason-bee, the three dagger-thrusts 
which the sphex administers to the three 
nerve-centres of the cricket, the lancet of 
the cerceris, who paralyses her victims 
Tvithout killing them and preserves them for 
an indefinite period as fresh meat, nor a 
thousand other features which it would be 
impossible to enumerate without recapitu- 
lating the whole of Henri Fabre's work 
and completely altering the proportions of 
the present essay. But here such silence and 
such darkness reign that we have nothing. 
290 



The Unknown Guest 

to hope for. There exists, so to speak, no 
bench-mark, no means of communication 
between the world of insects and our own; 
and we are perhaps less far from grasping 
and fathoming what takes place in Saturn 
or Jupiter than what is enacted in the ant- 
hill or the hive. We know absolutely 
nothing of the quality, the number, the ex- 
tent or even the nature of their senses. 
Many of the great laws on which our life 
is based do not exist for them: those, for 
instance, which govern fluids are completely 
reversed. They seem to Inhabit our planet, 
but In reality move In an entirely different 
world. Understanding nothing of their In- 
telligence pierced with disconcerting gaps, 
in which the blindest stupidity suddenly 
comes and destroys the ablest and most in- 
spired schemes, we have given the name of 
instinct to that which we could not appre- 
hend, postponing our interpretation of a 
word that touches upon life's most insoluble 
291 



The Unknown Guest 

riddles. There Is, therefore, from the 
point of view of the intellectual faculties, 
nothing to be gathered from those extra- 
ordinary creatures who are not, like the 
other animals, our "lesser brothers," but 
strangers, aliens from we know not where, 
survivors or percursors of another world. 

21 

We were at this stage, slumbering peace- 
fully in our long-established convictions, 
when a man entered upon the scene and 
suddenly showed us that we were wrong 
and that, for long centuries, we had over- 
looked a truth which was scarcely even 
covered with a very thin veil. And the 
strangest thing is that this astonishing dis- 
covery is in no wise the natural consequence 
of a new invention, of processes or methods 
hitherto unknown. It owes nothing to the 
latest acquirements of our knowledge. It 
springs from the humblest idea which the 
292 



The Unknown Guest 

most primitive man might have conceived in 
the first days of the earth's existence. It is 
simply a matter of having a little more 
patience, confidence and respect for all that 
which shares our lot in a world whereof we 
know none of the purposes. It is simply 
a matter of having a little less pride and 
of looking a little more fraternally upon 
existences that are much more fraternal 
than we believed. There is no secret about 
the almost puerile ingenuousness of Von 
Osten's methods and KralPs. They start 
with the principle that the horse is an ig- 
norant but intelligent child; and they treat 
him as such. They speak, explain, demon- 
strate, argue and mete out rewards or pun- 
ishments like a schoolmaster addressing 
little boys of five or six. They begin by. 
placing a few skittle-pins in front of their 
strange pupil. They count them and make 
him count them by alternately lifting and 
lowering the horse's hoof. He thus ob- 
293 



The Unknown Guest 

tains his first notion of numbers. They next 
add one or two more skittles and say, for 
instance : 

"Three skittles and two skittles are five 
skittles." 

In this way, they explain and teach addi- 
tion; next, by the reverse process, subtrac- 
tion, which is followed by multiplication, 
division and all the rest. 

At the beginning, the lessons are ex- 
tremely laborious and demand an untiring 
and loving patience, which is the whole se- 
cret of the miracle. But, as soon as the 
first barrier of darkness Is passed, the 
progress becomes bewllderingly rapid. 

All this is Incontestable; and the facts 
are there, before which we must needs bow. 
But what upsets all our convictions or, more 
correctly, all the prejudices which thousands 
of years have made as invincible as axiom.s, 
what we do not succeed In understanding is 
that the horse at once understands what we 
294 



The Unknown Guest 

want of him; It Is that first step, the first 
tremor of an unexpected intelligence, which 
suddenly reveals itself as human. At what 
precise second did the light appear and was 
the veil rent asunder? It is impossible to 
say; but it is certain that, at a given mo- 
ment, without any visible sign to reveal the 
prodigious inner transformation, the horse 
acts and replies as though he suddenly un- 
derstood the speech of man. What is it 
that sets the miracle working? We know 
that, after a time, the horse associates cer- 
tain words with certain objects that Interest 
him or with three or four events whose In- 
finite repetition forms the humble tissue of 
his daily life. This Is only a sort of me- 
chanical memory which has nothing in com- 
mon with the most elementary intelligence. 
But behold, one fine day, without any per- 
ceptible transition, he seems to know the 
meaning of a host of words which possess 
no Interest for him ; which represent to him 
295 



The Unknown Guest 

no picture, no memory ; which he has never 
had occasion to connect with any sensation, 
agreeable or disagreeable. He handles fig- 
ures which even to man are nothing but 
obscure and abstract ideas. He solves 
problems that cannot possibly be made ob- 
jective or concrete. He reproduces letters 
which, from his point of view, correspond 
with nothing actual. He fixes his attention 
and makes observations on things or circum- 
stances which in no way affect him, which 
remain and always will remain alien and in- 
different to him. In a word, he steps out of 
the narrow ring in which he was made to 
turn by hunger and fear — which have been 
described as the tvv^o great moving powers 
of all that is not human — to enter the im- 
mense circle in which sensations go on be- 
ing shed till ideas come into view. 

22 

Is it possible to believe that the horses 

2^6 



The Unknown Guest 

really do what they appear to do ? Is there 
no precedent for the marvel ? Is there no 
transition between the Elberfeld stallions 
and the horses which we have known until 
this day? It is not easy to answer these 
questions, for it is only since yesterday that 
the intellectual powers of our defenceless 
brothers have been subjected to strictly 
scientific experiments. We have, it is true, 
more than one collection of anecdotes in 
which the intelligence of animals is lauded 
to the skies ; but we cannot rely upon these 
ill-authenticated stories. To find genuine 
and incontestable Instances we must have 
recourse to the works, rare as yet, of scien- 
tific men who have m^ade a special study of 
the subject. M. Hachet-Souplet, for ex- 
ample, the director of the Institut de Psy- 
chologie Zoologique, mentions the case of 
a dog who learnt to acquire an abstract 
idea of weight. You put in front of him 
eight rounded and polished stones, all of 
297 



The Unknown Guest 

exactly the same size and shape, but of dif- 
ferent weights. You tell him to fetch the 
heaviest or the lightest; he judges their 
weight by lifting them and, without mis- 
take, picks out the one required. 

The same writer also tells the story of a 
parrot to whom he had taught the word 
"cupboard" by showing him a little box 
that could be hung up on the wall at dif- 
ferent heights and in which his daily al- 
lowance of food was always ostentatiously 
put away: 

"I next taught him the names of a num- 
ber of objects," says M. Hachet-Souplet, 
"by holding them out to him. Among 
them was a ladder; and I prevailed upon 
the bird to say, 'Climb,' each time that he 
saw me mount the steps. One morning, 
when the parrot's cage was brought into 
the laboratory, the cupboard was hanging 
near the ceiling, while the little ladder was 
298 



The Unknown Guest 

stowed away In a corner among other ob- 
jects familiar to the bird. Now the parrot, 
every day, when I opened the cupboard, 
used to scream, 'Cupboard! Cupboard! 
Cupboard!' with all his might. My prob- 
lem was, therefore, this: seeing that the 
cupboard was out of my reach and that, 
therefore, I could not take his food out 
of It; knowing, on the other hand, that I 
was able to raise myself above the level 
of the floor by climbing the ladder; and 
having the words 'climb' and 'ladder' at 
his disposal t would he employ them to sug- 
gest to me the idea of using them in order 
to reach the cupboard? Greatly excited, 
the parrot flapped his wings, bit the bars 
of his cage, and screamed: 

"'Cupboard! Cupboard! Cupboard!' 

"And I got no more out of him that day. 

The next day, the bird, having received 

nothing but millet, for which he did not 

much care, instead of the hemp-seed con- 

299 



The Unknown Guest 

talned in the cupboard, was in paroxysms 
of anger; and, after he had made number- 
less attempts to force open his bars, his 
attention was at last caught by the ladder 
and he said: 

" ladder, climb, cupboard !' " 

We have here, as the author remarks, a 
marvellous intellectual effort. There is an 
evident association of ideas ; cause is linked 
with effect; and examples such as this les- 
sen appreciably the distance separating our 
learned horses from their less celebrated 
brethren. We must admit, however, that 
this intellectual effort, if we observe animals 
a little carefully, is much less uncommon 
than we think. It surprises us in this case 
because a special and, when all is said, 
purely mechanical arrangement of the par- 
rot's organ gives him a human voice. At 
every moment, I find in my own dog asso- 
ciations of ideas no less evident and often 
300 



The Unknown Guest 

more complex. For instance, if he is 
thirsty, he seeks my eyes and next looks at 
the tap in the dressing-room, thus showing 
that he very plainly connects the notions of 
thirst, running water and human interven- 
tion. When I dress to go out, he evidently 
watches all my movements. While I am 
lacing my boots, he conscientiously licks my 
hands, in order that my divinity may be 
good to him and especially to congratulate 
me on my capital idea of going out for a 
constitutional. It is a sort of general and 
as yet vague approval. Boots promise an 
excursion out of doors, that is to say, space, 
fragrant roads, long grass full of surprises, 
corners scented with offal, friendly or tragic 
encounters and the pursuit of wholly il- 
lusory game. But the fair vision is still in 
anxious suspense. He does not yet know 
if he is going with me. His fate is now 
being decided; and his eyes, melting with 
anguish, devour my mind. If I buckle on 
301 



The Unknown Guest 

my leather gaiters, it means the sudden and 
utter extinction of all that constitutes the 
joy of life. They leave not a ray of hope. 
They herald the hateful, lonely motor- 
cycle, which he cannot keep up with; and 
he stretches himself sadly in a dark corner, 
where he goes back to the gloomy dreams 
of an unoccupied, forsaken dog. But, when 
I slip my arms into the sleeves of my hea\^' 
great-coat, one would think that they were 
opening the gates of the most dazzling 
paradise. For this imxplies the car, the ob- 
vious. Indubitable motor-car, in other 
words, the radiant summit of the most 
superlative delight. And delirious barks, 
inordinate bounds, riotous, embarrassing 
demonstrations of affection greet a happi- 
ness which, for all that, is but an im.mate- 
rial idea, built up of artless memories and 
ingenuous hopes. 

23 
I mention these matters only because they 
302 



The Unknown Guest 

are quite ordinary and because there is no- 
body who has not made a thousand similar 
observations. As a rule, we do not notice 
that these humble manifestations represent 
sentiments, associations of ideas, inferences, 
deductions, an absolute and altogether hu- 
man mental effort. They lack only speech; 
but speech is merely a mechanical accident 
which reveals the operations of thought 
more clearly to us. We are amazed that 
Muhamed or Zarif should recognize the 
picture of a horse, a donkey, a hat, or a 
man on horseback, or that they should spon- 
taneously report to their master the little 
events that happen in the stable; but it is 
certain that our own dog is incessantly per- 
forming a similar work and that his eyes, 
if we could read them, would tell us a great 
deal more. The primary miracle of Elber- 
feld is that the stallions should have been 
given the means of expressing what they 
think and feel. It is momentous ; but, when 
303 



The Unknown Guest 

closely looked into, it is not incomprehensi- 
ble. Between the talking horses and my 
silent dog there is an enormous distance, but 
not an abyss. I am saying this not to de- 
tract from the nature or extent of the 
prodigy, but to call attention to the fact 
that the theory of animal intelligence is 
more justifiable and less fanciful than one 
is at first inclined to think. 

24 

But the second and greater miracle is that 
man should have been able to rouse the 
horse from his immemorial sleep, to fix and 
direct his attention and to interest him in 
matters that are more foreign and indiffer- 
ent to him than the variations of tempera- 
ture in Sirius or Aldebaran are to us. It 
really seems, when we consider our precon- 
ceived ideas, that there is not in the animal 
an organic and insurmountable inability to 
do what man's brain does, a total and irre- 
304 



The Unknown Guest 

medlable absence of intellectual faculties, 
but rather a profound lethargy and torpor 
of those faculties. It lives in a sort of un- 
disturbed stolidity, of nebulous slumber. 
As Dr. Ochorowicz very justly remarks, 
"its waking state is very near akin to the 
state of a man walking in his sleep." 
Having no notion of space or time, it 
spends its life, one may say, in a perpetual 
dream. It does what is strictly necessary 
to keep itself alive; and all the rest passes 
over it and does not penetrate at all into 
its hermetically closed imaginings. Excep- 
tional circumstances — some extraordinary 
need, wish, passion or shock — are required 
to produce what M. Hachet-Souplet calls 
"the psychic flash" which suddenly thaws 
and galvanizes its brain, placing it for a 
minute in the waking state in which the 
human brain works normally. Nor Is this 
surprising. It does not need that awaken- 
ing in order to exist; and we know that na- 
305 



The Unknown Guest 

ture never makes great superfluous efforts. 

"The intellect," as Professor Clarapede 
well says, "appears only as a makeshift, an 
instrument which betrays that the organism 
is not adapted to its environment, a mode 
of expression which reveals a state of im- 
potence." 

It is probable that our brain at first suf- 
fered from the same lethargy, a condition, 
for that matter, from which many men 
have not yet emerged; and it is even more 
probable that, compared with other modes 
of existence, with other psychic phenomena, 
on another plane and in another sphere, 
the dense sleep in which we move is similar 
to that in which the lower animals have 
their being. It also is traversed, with in- 
creasing frequency, by psychic flashes of a 
different order and a different scope. See- 
ing, on the one side, the intellectual move- 
ment that seems to be spreading among our 
lesser brothers and, on the other, the ever 
306 



The Unknown Guest 

more constantly repeated manifestations of 
our subconsciousness, we might even ask 
ourselves if we have not here, on two dif- 
ferent planes, a tension, a parallel pressure, 
a new desire, a new attempt of the myste- 
rious spiritual force which animates the uni- 
verse and which seems to be incessantly 
seeking fresh outlets and fresh conducting- 
rods. Be this as it may, when the flash has 
passed, we behave very much as the animals 
do: we promptly lapse into the indifferent 
sleep which suffices also for our miserable 
ways. We ask no more of it, we do not 
follow the luminous trail that summons us 
to an unknown world, we go on turning in 
our dismal circle, like contented sleep- 
walkers, while Isis' sistrum rattles without 
respite to rouse the faithful. 

25 

I repeat, the great miracle of Elberfeld 
is that of having been able to prolong and 
307 



The Unknown Guest 

reproduce at will those isolated "psychic 
flashes." The horses, in comparison with 
the other animals, are here in the state of 
a man whose subliminal consciousness had 
gained the upper hand. That man would 
lead a higher existence, in an almost imma- 
terial atmosphere, of which the phenomena 
of metaphysics, sparks falling from a re- 
gion which we shall perhaps one day reach, 
sometimes give us an uncertain and fleet- 
ing glimpse. Our intelligence, which is 
really lethargy and which keeps us impris- 
oned in a little hollow of space and time, 
would there be replaced by intuition, or 
rather by a sort of immanent knowledge 
which would forthwith make us sharers in 
all that is known to a universe which per- 
haps knows all things. Unfortunately, we 
have not, or at least, unlike the horses, we 
are not acquainted with a superior being 
who interests himself in us and helps us to 
throw ofl our torpor. We have to become 
308 



The Unknown Guest 

our own god, to rise above ourselves and 
to keep ourselves raised by our unaided 
strength. It is almost certain that the horse 
would never have come out of his nebulous 
sphere without man's assistance; but it is 
not forbidden to hope that man, with no 
other help than his own courage and high 
purpose, may yet succeed in breaking 
through the sleep that cramps him and 
blinds him. 

26 
To come back then to our horses and 
to the main point, which is the isolated 
''psychic flash," it is admitted that they 
know the values of figures, that they can 
distinguish and identify smells, colours, 
forms, objects and even graphic reproduc- 
tions of those objects. They also under- 
stand a large number of words, including 
some of which they were never taught the 
meaning, but which they picked up as they 
went along by hearing them spoken around 
309 



The Unknown Guest 

them. They have learnt, with the as- 
sistance of an exceedingly complicated al- 
phabet, to reproduce the words, thanks to 
which they manage to convey impressions, 
sensations, wishes, associations of ideas, ob- 
servations and even spontaneous reflections. 
It has been held that all this implies real 
acts of intelligence. It is, in fact, often 
very difficult to decide exactly how far it 
is intelligence and how far mem.ory, in- 
stinct, imitative genius, obedience or me- 
chanical impulse, the effects of training, or 
happy coincidences. 

There are cases, however, which admit 
of little or no hesitation. I give a few. 

One day Krall and his collaborator, Dr. 
Scholler, thought that they would try and 
teach Muhamed to express himself in 
speech. The horse, a docile and eager 
pupil, made touching and fruitless efforts 
to reproduce human sounds. Suddenly, 
he stopped and, in his strange phonetic 
310 



The Unknown Guest 

spelling, declared, by striking his foot on 
the spring-board: 

^^Ig hb kein gud Sdim: I have not a good 
voice." 

Observing that he did not open his 
mouth, they strove to make him understand, 
by the example of a dog, with pictures, and 
so on, that, In order to speak, It Is necessary 
to separate the jaws. They next asked 
him: 

*'What must you do to speak?" 

He replied, by striking with his foot : 

"Open mouth." 

*'Why don't you open yours?" 

''PFeil kan ntgd: because I can't." 

A few days after, Zarif was asked how 
he talks to Muhamed, 

''Mit Miint: with mouth." 

"Why don't you tell me that with your 
mouth?" 

^^Weil ig kein Stim hbe: because I have 



no voice." 



311 



The Unknown Guest 

Does not this answer, as Krall remarks, 
allow us to suppose that he has other means 
than speech of conversing with his stable- 
companion ? 

In the course of another lesson, Mu- 
hamed was shown the portrait of a young 
girl whom he did not know. 

"What's that?" asked his master. 

"Metgen: a girl?" 

On the black-board : 

"Why is it a girl?" 

^^JVetl Jang Hr hd: because she has long 
hair." 

"And what has she not?" 

"Moustache." 

They next produced the likeness of a 
man with no moustache. 

"What's this?" 

''Manr 

"Why is it a man?" 

''We'll kurz Hr had: because he has 
short hair." 

312 



The Unknown Guest 

I could multiply these examples indefi- 
nitely by drawing on the voluminous Elber- 
feld minutes, which, I may say In passing, 
have the convincing force of photographic 
records. All this, It must be agreed, is un- 
expected and disconcerting, had never been 
foreseen or suspected and may be regarded 
as one of the strangest prodigies, one of 
the most stupefying revelations that have 
taken place since man has dwelt in this 
world of riddles. Nevertheless, by reflect- 
ing, by comparing, by investigating, by re- 
garding certain forgotten or neglected land- 
marks and starting-points, by taking into 
consideration the thousand Imperceptible 
gradations between the greatest and the 
least, the highest and the lowest, It is still 
possible to explain, admit and understand. 
We can, if it comes to that. Imagine that, 
in his secret self, in his tragic silence, our 
dog also makes similar remarks and reflec- 
tions. Once again, the miraculous bridge 
313 



The Unknown Guest 

which, in this instance, spans the gulf be- 
tween the animal and man is much more 
the expression of thought than thought it- 
self. We may go further and grant that 
certain elementary calculations, such as 
little additions, little subtractions of one or 
two figures, are, after all, conceivable; and 
I, for my part, am inclined to believe that 
the horse really executes them. But where 
we get out of our depth, where we enter 
into the realm of pure enchantment is when 
it becomes a matter of mathematical opera- 
tions on a large scale, notably of the finding 
of roots. We know, for instance, that the 
extraction of the fourth root of a number 
of six figures calls for eighteen multiplica- 
tions, ten subtractions and three divisions 
and that the horse does thirt>^-one sums in 
five or six seconds, that Is to say, 
during the brief, careless glance which 
he gives at the black-board on which 
the problem is Inscribed, as though the 
314 



The Unknown Guest 

answer came to him intuitively and in- 
stantaneously. 

Still, if we admit the theory of intelli- 
gence, we must also admit that the horse 
knows what he Is doing, since it Is not until 
after learning what a squared number or a 
square root means that he appears to un- 
derstand or that, at any rate, he gradually 
works out correctly the ever more compli- 
cated calculations required of him. It Is 
not possible to give here the details of this 
instruction, which was astonishingly rapid. 
The reader will find them on pages 117 
et seq. of KralPs book, Denkende Tiere. 
Krall begins by explaining to Muhamed 
that 2^ Is equal to 2X2 = 4; that 2^ is 
equal to 2X2X2 = 6; that 2 is the 
square root of 4 ; and so on. In short, the 
explanations and demonstrations are abso- 
lutely similar to those which one would 
give to an extremely Intelligent child, with 
this difference, that the horse Is much more 
315 



The Unknown Guest 

attentive than the child and that, thanks 
to his extraordinary memory, he never for- 
gets what he appears to have understood. 
Let us add, to complete the magical and 
incredible character of the phenomenon 
that, according to Krall's own statement, 
the horse was not taught beyond the point 
of extracting the square root of the num- 
ber 144 and that he spontaneously Invented 
the manner of extracting all the others. 

27 

Must we once more repeat, in connection 
with these startling performances, that 
those who speak of audible or visible sig- 
nals, of telegraphy and wireless telegraphy, 
of expedients, tricker\^ or deceit, are speak- 
ing of what they do not know and of what 
they have not seen? There is but one re- 
ply to be made to any one who honestly 
refuses to believe: 

"Go to Elberfeld — the problem Is suffi- 
316 



The Unknown Guest 

ciently Important, sufficiently big with con- 
sequences to make the journey worth while 
— and, behind closed doors, alone with the 
horse, in the absolute solitude and silence of 
the stable, set Muhamed to extract half-a- 
dozen roots which, like that which I have 
mentioned, require thirty-one operations. 
You must yourself be ignorant of the solu- 
tions, so as to do away with any transmis- 
sion of unconscious thought. If he then 
gives you, one after the other, five or six 
correct solutions, as he did to me and many 
others, you will not go away with the con- 
viction that the animal is able by its In- 
telligence to extract those roots, because 
that conviction would upset too thoroughly 
the greater part of the certainties on which 
your life Is based; but you will, at any rate, 
be persuaded that you have been for a few 
minutes In the presence of one of the great- 
est and strangest riddles that can disturb 
the mind of man; and It is always a good 
317 



The Unknown Guest 

and salutary thing to come into contact with 
emotions of this order." 

28 

Truth to say, the theory of intelligence 
in the animal would be so extraordinary as 
to be almost untenable. If we are deter- 
mined, at whatever cost, to pin our faith to 
it, we are bound to call in the aid of other 
ideas, to appeal, for instance, to the ex- 
tremely mysterious and essentially uncom- 
prehended and incomprehensible nature of 
numbers. It is almost certain that the 
science of mathematics lies outside the in- 
telligence. It forms a mechanical and ab- 
stract whole, more spiritual than material 
and more material than spiritual, visible 
only through its shadow and yet constitut- 
ing the most immovable of the realities that 
govern the universe. From first to last it 
declares itself a very strange force and, as 
it were, the sovereign of another element 
318 



The Unknown Guest 

than that which nourishes our brain. Secret, 
Indifferent, Imperious and Implacable, It 
subjugates and oppresses us from a great 
height or a great depth, In any case, from 
very far, without telling us why. One 
might say that figures place those who 
handle them In a special condition. They 
draw the cabalistic circle around their vic- 
tim. Henceforth, he Is no longer his own 
master, he renounces his liberty, he Is lit- 
erally ''possessed" by the powers which he 
Invokes. He Is dragged he knows not 
whither, Into a formless, boundless Immens- 
ity, subject to laws that have nothing hu- 
man about them. In which each of those 
lively and tyrannical little signs which m^ove 
and dance in their thousands under the pen 
represents nameless, but eternal, invincible 
and inevitable verities. We think that we 
are directing them and they enslave us. We 
become weary and breathless following 
them into their uninhabitable spaces. 
319 



The Unknown Guest 

When we touch them, we let loose a force 
which we are no longer able to control. 
They do with us what they will and always 
end by hurling us, blinded and benumbed, 
into blank infinity or upon a wall of ice 
against which every effort of our mind and 
will is shattered. 

It is possible, therefore, in the last resort, 
to explain the Elberfeld mystery by the no 
less obscure mystery that surrounds num- 
bers. This really only means moving to 
another spot in the gloom; but It Is often 
just by that moving to another spot that 
we end by discovering the little gleam of 
light which shows us a thoroughfare. In 
any case, and to return to more precise 
ideas, more than one Instance has been 
cited to prove that the gift of handling 
great groups of figures is almost indepen- 
dent of the intelligence proper. One of the 
most curious is that of an Italian shepherd- 
boy, Vito Mangiamele, who was brought 
320 



The Unknown Guest 

before the Paris Academy of Science in 
1837 and who, at the age of ten, though de- 
void of the most rudimentary education, 
was able in half a minute to extract the 
cubic root of a number of seven figures. 
Another, more striking still, also mentioned 
by Dr. Clarapede in his paper on the 
learned horses, is that of a man blind from 
birth, an inmate of the lunatic-asylum at 
Armentieres. This blind man, whose name 
is Fleury, a degenerate and nearly an idiot, 
can calculate in one minute and fifteen sec- 
onds the number of seconds in thirty-nine 
years, three months and twelve days, not 
forgetting the leap-years. They explain to 
him what a square root is, without telling 
him the conventional method of finding it ; 
and soon he extracts almost as rapidly as 
Inaudi himself, without a blunder, the 
square roots of numbers of four figures, 
giving the remainder. On the other hand, 
we know that a mathematical genius like 
321 



The Unknown Guest 

Henri Poincare confessed himself incapable 
of adding up a column of figures without 
a mistake. 

29 

From the maybe enchanted atmosphere 
that surrounds numbers we shall pass more 
easily to the even more magic mists of the 
final theory, the only one remaining to us 
for the moment : the mediumistic or sub- 
liminal theory. This, we must remember, 
Is not the telepathic theory proper which 
decisive experiments have made us reject. 
Let us have the courage to venture upon 
it. When one can no longer interpret a 
phenomenon by the known, we must needs 
try to do so by the unknown. We, there- 
fore, now enter a new province of a great 
unexplored kingdom, in which we shall find 
ourselves without a guide. 

Mediumistic phenomena, manifestations 
of the secondary or the subliminal con- 
sciousness, between man and man, are, as 
322 



The Unknown Guest 

we have more than once had occasion to 
assure ourselves, capricious, undisciplined, 
evasive and uncertain, but more frequent 
than one thought and, to one who examines 
them seriously and honestly, often unde- 
niable. Have similar manifestations been 
discovered between man and the animals? 
The study of these manifestations, which is 
very difficult even in the case of man, be- 
comes still more so when we question wit- 
nesses doomed to silence. There are, how- 
ever, some animals which are looked upon 
as "psychic," which, in other words, seem 
indisputably to be sensitive to certain sub- 
liminal influences. One usually classes the 
cat, the dog and the horse in this somewhat 
ill-defined category. To these superstitious 
animals one might perhaps add certain 
birds, more or less birds of omen, and even 
a few insects, notably the bees. Other 
animals, such as, for instance, the elephant 
and the monkey, appear to be proof against 
223 



The Unknown Guest 

mystery. Be this as it may, M. Ernest 
Bozzano, in an excellent article on Les Per- 
ceptions psychiques des animaux,^ collected 
in 1905 sixty-nine cases of telepathy, pre- 
sentiments and hallucinations of sight or 
hearing in which the principal actors are 
cats, dogs and horses. There are, even 
among them, ghosts or phantoms of dogs 
which, after their death, return to haunt 
the homes in which they were happy. Most 
of these cases are taken from the Proceed- 
ings of the S. P. R.y that is to say, they 
have nearly all been very strictly investi- 
gated. It is impossible, short of filling 
these pages with often striking and touch- 
ing but rather cumbersome anecdotes, to 
enumerate them here, however briefly. It 
will be sufficient to note that sometimes the 
dog begins to howl at the exact moment 
when his master loses his life, for instance. 



'^Annates des sciences psychiques, August, 1905, pp. 
422-469. 

324 



The Unknown Guest 

on a battlefield, hundreds of miles from 
the place where the dog is. More com- 
monly, the cat, the dog and the horse 
plainly manifest that they perceive, often 
before men do, telepathic apparitions, 
phantasms of the living or the dead. 
Horses in particular seem very sensitive to 
places that pass as haunted or uncanny. On 
the whole, the result of these observations 
is that we can hardly dispute that these ani- 
mals communicate as much as we do and 
perhaps in the same fashion with the mys- 
tery that lies around us. There are mo- 
ments at which, like man, they see the in- 
visible and perceive events, influences and 
emotions that are beyond the range of their 
normal senses. It is, therefore, permissible 
to believe that their nervous system or some 
remote or secret part of their being con- 
tains the same psychic elements connecting 
them with an unknown that Inspires them 
with as much terror as It does ourselves. 
32s 



The Unknown Guest 

And, let us say In passing, this terror is 
rather strange; for, after all, what have 
they to fear from a phantom or an appari- 
tion, they who, we are convinced, have no 
after-Hfe and who ought, therefore, to re- 
main perfectly Indifferent to the manifesta- 
tions of a world In which they will never 
set foot? 

I shall perhaps be told that it Is not 
certain that these apparitions are objective, 
that they correspond with an external real- 
ity, but that it is exceedingly possible that 
they spring solely from the man's or the 
animal's brain. This Is not the moment to 
discuss this very obscure point, which raises 
the whole question of the supernatural and 
all the problems of the hereafter. The 
only Important thing to observe Is that 'at 
one time it Is man who transmits his ter- 
ror, his perception or his idea of the In- 
visible to the animal and at another the 
animal which transmits its sensations to 
326 



The Unknown Guest 

man. We have here, therefore, intercom- 
munications which spring from a deeper 
common source than any that we know and 
which, to issue from it or go back to it, pass 
through other channels than those of our 
customary senses. Now all this belongs to 
that unexplained sensibility, to that secret 
treasure, to that as yet undetermined 
psychic power which, for lack of a better 
term, we call subconsciousness or subliminal 
consciousness. Moreover, it is not surpris- 
ing that, in the animals, these subliminal 
faculties not only exist, but are perhaps 
keener and more active than in ourselves, 
because it is our conscious and abnormally 
individualized life that atrophies them by 
relegating them to a state of idleness 
wherein they have fewer and fewer oppor- 
tunities of being exercised, whereas in our 
brothers who are less detached from the 
universe, consciousness — if we can give that 
name to a very uncertain and confused no- 

^2-7 



The Unknown Guest 

tion of the ego — is reduced to a few ele- 
mentary actions. They are much less sep- 
arated than ourselves from the whole of 
the circumambient life and they still pos- 
sess a number of those more general and 
indeterminate senses whereof we have been 
deprived by the gradual encroachment of 
a narrow and intolerant special faculty, our 
intelligence. Among these senses w^hich 
up to the present we have described as in- 
stincts, for want — and it is becoming a 
pressing want — of a more suitable and defi- 
nite word, need I mention the sense of di- 
rection, migration, foreknowledge of the 
weather, of earthquakes and avalanches 
and many others which we doubtless do not 
even suspect? Does all this not belong to 
a subconsciousness which differs from ours 
only in being so much richer? 

30 

I am fully aware that this explanation by 

328 



The Unknown Guest 

means of the subliminal consciousness will 
not explain very much and will at most 
invoke the aid of the unknown to illuminate 
the Incomprehensible. But to explain a 
phenomenon, as Dr. J. de Modzelwski 
very truly says, "is to put forward a theory 
which is more familiar and more easily 
comprehensible to us than the phenomenon 
at issue." This is really what we are con- 
stantly and almost exclusively doing in 
physics, chemistry, biology and In every 
branch of science w^Ithout exception. To 
explain a phenomenon Is not necessarily to 
make it as clear and pellucid as that two 
and two are four; and, even so, the fact 
that two and two are four Is not, when we 
go to the bottom of things, as clear and 
pellucid as it seems. What In this case, as 
in most others, we wrongfully call explain- 
ing IS simply confronting the unexpected 
mystery which these horses offer us with a 
few phenomena which are themselves un- 
329 



The Unknown Guest 

known, but which have been perceived 
longer and more frequently. And this 
same mystery, thus explained, will serve 
one day to explain others. It is in this way 
that science goes to work. We must not 
blame it: it does what it can; and it does 
not appear that there are other ways. 

31 

If we assent to this explanation by means 
of the subliminal consciousness, which is a 
sort of mysterious participation in all that 
happens in this world and the others, m.any 
obstacles disappear and we enter into a new 
region in which we draw strangely nearer 
to the animals and really become their 
brothers by closer links, perhaps the only 
essential links in life. They take part from 
that moment in the great human problems, 
in the extraordinary actions of our unknown 
guest ; and, if, since we have been observing 
the indwelling force more attentively, noth- 
330 



The Unknown Guest 

ing any longer surprises us of that which it 
realizes In us, no more should anything 
surprise us of that which it realizes in them. 
We are on the same plane with them, In 
some as yet undetermined element, where it 
is no longer the intelligence that reigns 
alone, but another spiritual power, which 
pays no heed to the brain, which passes by 
other roads and which might rather be the 
psychic substance of the universe itself, no 
longer set In grooves, isolated and spe- 
cialized by man, but diffused, multiform 
and perhaps, if we could trace it, equal in 
everything that exists. 

There is, henceforth, no reason why the 
horses should not participate In most of the 
medlumlstic phenomena which we find exist- 
ing between man and man; and their mys- 
tery ceases to be distinct from those of hu- 
man metaphysics. If their subliminal is 
akin to ours, we can begin by extending to 
its utmost limits the telepathic theory, 
331 



The Unknown Guest 

which has, so to speak, no limits, for, in 
the matter of telepathy, as Myers has said, 
all that we are permitted to declare is that 
"life has the power of manifesting itself 
to life." We may ask ourselves, therefore, 
if the problem which I set to the horse, 
without knowing the terms of it, is not com- 
municated to my subliminal, which is ig- 
norant of it, by that of the horse, who has 
read it. It Is practically certain that this 
is possible between human subliminals. Is 
it I who see the solution and transmit it to 
the horse, who only repeats it to me? But, 
suppose that it is a problem which I myself 
am Incapable of solving? Whence does 
the solution come, then? I do not know 
if the experiment has been attempted, under 
the same conditions, with a human medium. 
For that matter, if It succeeded, it would 
be very much the same as the no less sub- 
liminal phenomenon of the arithmetical 
prodigies, or lightning calculators, with 
33^ 



The Unknown Guest 

which, in this rather superhuman atmos- 
phere, we are almost forced to compare the 
riddle of the mathematical horses. Of all 
the interpretations, it is the one which, for 
the moment, appears to me the least eccen- 
tric and the most natural. 

We have seen that the gift of handling 
colossal figures is almost foreign to the in- 
telligence proper; one can even declare 
that, in certain cases, it is evidently and 
completely independent of such intelligence. 
In these cases, the gift is manifested prior 
to any education and from the earliest years 
of childhood. If we refer to the list of 
arithmetical prodigies given by Dr. Scrip- 
ture,^ we see that the faculty made its ap- 
pearance in Ampere at the age of three, in 
Colburn at six, in Gauss at three, in 
Mangiamele at ten, in Safford at six, in 
Whateley at three, and so on. Generally, 
it lasts for only a few years, becoming 

^American Journal of Psychology, i April 1891. 
233 



The Unknown Guest 

rapidl}^ enfeebled with age and usually van- 
ishing suddenh" at the moment when its pos- 
sessor begins to go to school. 

When you ask those children and even 
most of the lightning calculators who have 
come to man's estate how they go to work 
to solve the huge and complicated problems 
set them, they reply that they know noth- 
ing about it. Bidder, for instance, declares 
that it is impossible for him to say how 
he can instinctively tell the logarithm of a 
number consisting of seven or eight figures. 
It is the same with Safford, who, at the age 
of ten, used to do in his head, without ever 
making a mistake, multiplication-sums the 
result of which ran into thirt}^-six figures. 
The solution presents itself authoritatively 
and spontaneously; it is a vision, an impres- 
sion, an inspiration, an intuition coming one 
knows not whence, suddenly and indubita- 
bly. As a rule, they do not even try to 
calculate. Contrary to the general belief, 

334 



The Unknown Guest 

they have no peculiar methods; or, if 
method there be, it is more a practical way 
of subdividing the intuition. One would 
think that the solution springs suddenly 
from the very enunciation of the problem, 
in the same way as a veridical hallucination. 
It appears to rise, infallible and ready- 
done, from a sort of eternal and cosmic 
reservoir wherein the answers to every i 
question lie dormant. It must, therefore, 
be admitted that we have here a phenome- 
non that occurs above or below the brain, 
by the side of the consciousness and the 
mind, outside all the Intellectual methods 
and habits ; and it is precisely for phenom- 
ena of this kind that Myers Invented the 
word ''subliminal."^ 



II have no need to recall the derivation of the term 
subliminal: beneath (sub) the threshold {limen) of 
consciousness. Let us add, as M. de Vesme very 
rightly remarks, that the subliminal is not exactly 
what classical psychology calls the subconsciousness, 
which latter records only notions that are normally 
perceived and possesses only normal faculties, that is 
to say, faculties recognized to-day by orthodox science. 

335 



The Unknown Guest 

32 
Does not all this bring us a little nearer 
to our calculating horses? From the mo- 
ment that it is demonstrated that the solu- 
tion of a mathematical problem no longer 
depends exclusively on the brain, but on an- 
other faculty, another spiritual power 
whose presence under various forms has 
been ascertained beyond a doubt in certain 
animals, it ceases to be wholly rash or ex- 
travagant to suggest that perhaps, in the 
horse, the same phenomenon is reproduced 
and developed in the same unknown, 
wherein moreover the mysteries of numbers 
and those of subconsciousness mingle in a 
like darkness. I am well aware that an 
explanation laden to such an extent with 
mysteries explains but very little more than 
silence does; nevertheless, it is at least a 
silence traversed by restless murmurs and 
sedulous whispers that are better than the 
gloomy and hopeless ignorance to which 

33^ 



The Unknown Guest 

we would have perforce to resign ourselves 
If we did not struggle, In spite of all, to 
perform the great duty of man, which Is 
to discover a spark In the darkness. 

It goes without saying that objections are 
raised from every side. Among men, arith- 
metical prodigies are looked upon as mon- 
sters, as a sort of extremely rare teratolog- 
Ical phenomenon. We can count, at most, 
half-a-dozen in a century, whereas, among 
horses, the faculty would appear to be al- 
most general, or at least quite common. In 
fact, out of six or seven stallions whom 
Krall tried to initiate into the secrets of 
mathematics, he found only two that ap- 
peared to him too poorly gifted for him 
to waste time on their education. These 
were, I believe, two thoroughbreds that 
were presented to him by the Grand-duke 
of Mecklenburg and sent back by Krall to 
their sumptuous stables. In the four or 
five others, taken at random as clrcum- 

337 



The Unknown Guest 

stances supplied them, he met with aptitudes 
unequal, It Is true, but easily developed and 
giving the Impression that they exist nor- 
mally, latent and Inactive, at the bottom of 
every equine soul. From the mathematical 
point of view, Is the horse's subliminal 
consciousness then superior to man's? Why 
not? His whole subliminal being Is prob- 
ably superior to ours, of greater range, 
younger, fresher, more alive and less heavy, 
since it is not incessantly attacked, coerced 
and humiliated by the Intelligence which 
gnaws at it, stifles It, cloaks It and relegates 
It to a dark corner which neither light nor 
air can penetrate. His subliminal con- 
sciousness Is always present, always alert; 
ours Is never there. Is asleep at the bottom 
of a deserted well and needs exceptional 
operations, results and events before it can 
be drawn from its slumber and Its unre- 
membered deeps. All this seems very ex- 
traordinary; but, in any case, we are here 
338 



The Unknown Guest 

In the midst of the extraordinary; and this 
outlet Is perhaps the least hazardous. It 
Is not a question, we must remember, of a 
cerebral operation, an Intellectual perform- 
ance, but of a gift of divination closely al- 
lied to other gifts of the same nature and 
the same origin which are not the peculiar 
attribute of man. No observation, no ex- 
periment enables us, up to the present, to 
establish a difference between the subliminal 
of human beings and that of animals. On 
the contrary, the as yet restricted number 
of actual cases reveals constant and striking 
analogies between the two. In most of 
those arithmetical operations, be It noted, 
the subliminal of the horse behaves exactly 
like that of the medium In a state of trance. 
The horse readily reverses the figures of 
the solution; he replies, "37," for Instance, 
instead of "73," which is a medlumlstic 
phenomenon so well-known and so frequent 
that It has been styled "mirror-wrltlng." 

339 



The Unknown Guest 

He makes mistakes fairly often in the most 
elementary additions and subtractions and 
much less frequently in the extraction of 
the most complicated roots, which again, in 
similar cases, such as "xenoglossy" and 
psychometry, is one of the eccentricities of 
human mediumism and is explained by the 
same cause, namely, the inopportune inter- 
vention of the ever fallible intelligence, 
which, by meddling in the matter, alters the 
certainties of a subliminal which, when left 
to itself, never makes a mistake. It is, in 
fact, quite probable that the horse, being 
really able to do the small sums, no longer 
relies solely on his intuition and, from that 
moment, gropes and flounders about. The 
solution hovers between the intelligence and 
the subliminal and, passing from the one, 
which is not quite sure of it, to the other, 
which is not urgently appealed to, comes 
out of the conflict as best it may. The 
case is the same with the psychometric or 
340 



The Unknown Guest 

spiritualistic medium who seeks to profit by 
what he knows in the ordinary way, so as 
to complete the visions or revelations of his 
subconscious sensibility. He, too, in this 
instance, is nearly always guilty of flagrant 
and inexplicable blunders. 

Many other similarities will be found to 
exist, notably the way in which the lessons 
vary. Nothing is more uncertain and capri- 
cious than manifestations of human medi- 
umism. Whether it be a question of auto- 
matic writing, psychometry, materializa- 
tions or anything else, we meet with series 
of sittings that yield none but absurd re- 
sults. Then, suddenly, for reasons as yet 
obscure — the state of the weather, the pres- 
ence of this or that witness, or I know not 
what — the most undeniable and bewildering 
manifestations occur one after the other. 
The case is precisely the same with the 
horses : their queer fancies, their unaccount- 
able and disconcerting freaks drive poor 
341 



The Unknown Guest 

Krall to despair. He never opens the door 
of that uncertain stable, on important days, 
without a sinking at the heart. Let the 
beard or the frown of some learned profes- 
sor fail to please the horses: they will, 
forthwith, take an unholy delight in giving 
the most irrelevant answers to the most ele- 
mentary questions for hours and even days 
on end. 

Other common features are the strongly- 
marked personality of the mediumistic 
"raps" and the communications known as 
"deferred telepathic communications," that 
is to say, those in which the answer is ob- 
tained at the end of a sitting to a question 
put at the beginning and forgotten by all 
those present. What at first sight seems 
one of the strongest objections urged 
against the mediumism of the horse even 
tends to confirm it. If the reply comes from 
the horse's subconsciousness, It has been 
asked, how Is It that It should be necessary 
342 



The Unknown Guest 

first to teach him the elements of language, 
mathematics and so forth, and that Berto, 
for instance, is incapable of solving the 
same problems as Muhamed? This ob- 
jection has been very ably refuted by M. de 
Vesme, who writes : 

"To produce automatic writing, a me- 
dium must have learnt to write; before 
Victorien Sardou or Mile Helene Schmidt 
could produce their mediumistic drawings 
and paintings, they had to possess an ele- 
mentary knowledge of drawing and paint- 
ing; Tartini would never have composed 
The Devil's Sonata in a dream, if he had 
not known music; and so forth. Uncon- 
scious cerebration, however wonderful, can 
only take effect upon elements already ac- 
quired in some way or another. The sub- 
conscious cerebration of a man blind from 
birth will not make him see colours." 



343 



The Unknown Guest 

Here, then, in this comparison which 
might easily be extended, are several fairl}^ 
well-defined features of resemblance. ^Ye 
receive a vivid impression of the same 
habits, the same contradictions and the 
same eccentricities; and we once more rec- 
ognize the strange and majestic shadow of 
our unknown guest. 

33 

One great objection remains, based upon 
the very nature of the phenomenon, upon 
the really insuperable distance that sep- 
arates the whole life of the horse from the 
abstract and impenetrable life of numbers. 
How can his subliminal consciousness in- 
terest itself for a moment in signs that 
represent nothing to him, have no relation 
to his organism and will never touch his 
existence? But, in the first place, it is just 
the same with the child or the ilhterate cal- 
344 



The Unknown Guest 

culator. He Is not Interested either in the 
figures which he lets loose. He is com- 
pletely Ignorant of the consequences of the 
problems which he solves. He juggles with 
digits which have hardly any more mean- 
ing to him than to the horse. He is In- 
capable of accounting for what he does; 
and his subconsciousness also acts in a sort 
of Indifferent and remote dream. It Is true 
that, In his case, we can appeal to heredity 
and to memory; but is this difference 
enough to settle the difficulty and definitely 
to separate the two phenomena? To ap- 
peal to heredity is still to appeal to the 
subliminal; and It Is not at all certain that 
the latter Is limited by the Interest of the 
organism sheltering it. It appears, on the 
contrary, In many circumstances, to spread 
and extend far beyond that organism in 
which It Is domiciled, one would say, acci- 
dentally and provisionally. It likes to show, 
apparently, that It Is In relation with all 
345 



The Unknown Guest 

that exists. It declares itself, as often as 
possible, universal and impersonal. It has 
but a very indifferent care, as we have seen 
in the matter of apparitions and premoni- 
tions, for the happiness and even the safety 
of its host and protector. It prophesies to 
its companion of a lifetime events which he 
cannot avoid or which do not concern him. 
It makes him see beforehand, for instance, 
all the circumstances of the death of a 
stranger whom he will only hear of after 
the event, when this event is irrevocable. It 
brings a crowd of barren presentiments and 
conjures up veridical hallucinations that are 
wholly alien and idle. With psychometric, 
typtological or materializing mediums. It 
practises art for art's sake, mocks at space 
and time, passes through personalities, sees 
through solid bodies, brings Into communica- 
tion thoughts and emotions worlds apart, 
reads souls and lives by the light of a flower, 
a rag or a scrap of paper; and all this for 
346 



The Unknown Guest 

nothing, to amuse Itself, to astonish us, 
because It adores the superfluous, the Inco- 
herent, the unexpected, the Improbable, the 
bewildering, or rather, perhaps, because it 
Is a huge, rough, undisciplined force still 
struggling In the darkness and coming to 
the surface only by wild fits and starts, be- 
cause it Is an enormous expansion of a spirit 
striving to collect itself, to achieve con- 
sciousness, to make itself of service and to 
obtain a hearing. In any case, for the time 
being, it appears just what we have de- 
scribed, and would be unlike Itself if It be- 
haved any otherwise In the case that puz- 
zles us. 

34 

Lastly, to close this chapter, let us remark 
that it is nearly certain that the solution 
given by calculating children and horses is 
not of a mathematical nature at all. They 
do not in any way consider the problem or 
347 



The Unknown Guest 

the sum to be worked. They simply find 
the answer straight away to a riddle, the 
guessing of which is made easy by the actual 
nature of figures which keep their secrets 
badly. To any one in the requisite state of 
mind, it becomes a question of a sort of 
elementary charade, which hides its answer 
only from those who speak another lan- 
guage. It Is evident that every problem, 
however complex it may appear, carries 
within its very enunciation its one, invari- 
able solution, scarce veiled by the indiscreet 
signs that contain or cover it. It is there, 
under the numbers that have no other ob- 
ject than to give it life, tossing, stirring and 
ceaselessly proclaiming itself a necessity. It 
is not surprising therefore that eyes sharper 
than ours and ears open to other vibra- 
tions should see and hear it without know- 
ing what it represents, what it implies or 
from what prodigious mass of figures and 
operations it emerges. The problem itself 
348 



The Unknown Guest 

speaks; and the horse but repeats the sign 
which he hears whispered In the mysterious 
life of numbers or deep down in the abyss 
where the eternal verities hold sway. 
He understands none of it, he has no need 
to understand, he Is but the unconscious 
medium who lends his voice or his limbs to 
the mind that inspires him. There is here 
but a bare and simple answer, bearing no 
precise significance, seized In an alien exist- 
ence. There Is here but a mechanical reve- 
lation, so to speak, a sort of special reflex 
which we can only record and which, for the 
rest, Is as inexplicable as any other pheno- 
menon of consciousness or Instinct. After 
all, when we think of it. It is just as aston- 
ishing that we should not perceive the so- 
lution as it is that we should discover It. 
However, I grant that all this is but a ven- 
turesome Interpretation to be taken for what 
it Is worth, an experimental or interim 
theory with which we must needs content 

349 



The Unknown Guest 

ourselves since all the others have hitherto 
been controverted by the facts. 

35 

Let us now briefly sum up what these 
Elberfeld experiments have yielded us. 
Having put aside telepathy in the narrow 
sense — which perhaps enters into more 
than one phenomenon but is not indispen- 
sable ,to it, for we see these same phe- 
nomena repeated when telepathy is prac- 
tically impossible — we cannot help observ- 
ing that, if we deny the existence or the 
influence of the subliminal, it is all the more 
diflicult to contest the existence and the in- 
tervention of the intelligence, at any rate up 
to the extracting of roots, after which there 
Is a steep precipice which ends in darkness. 
But, even if we stop at the roots, the sudden 
discovery of an intellectual force so similar 
to our own, where we were accustomed to 
see but an irremediable impotency, is no 
350 



The Unknown Guest 

doubt one of the most unexpected revela- 
tions that we have received since the in- 
visible and the unknown began to press 
upon us with a persistence and an impa- 
tience which they had not displayed hereto- 
fore. It is not easy to foresee as yet the 
consequences and the promises of this new 
aspect which the great riddle of the intelli- 
gence is suddenly adopting. But I believe 
that we shall soon have to revise some of 
the essential ideas which are the founda- 
tions of our life and that some rather 
strange horizons are appearing out of the 
mists in the history of psychology, of mo- 
rality, of human destiny and of many other 
things. 

36 

So much for the intelligence. On the 
other hand, what we deny to the intelli- 
gence we are constrained to grant to the 
subliminal ; and the revelation is even more 
351 



The Unknown Guest 

disconcerting. We should then have to admit 
that there is In the horse — and hence most 
probably in everything that lives on this 
earth — a psychic power similar to that 
which is hidden beneath the veil of our 
reason and which, as we learn to know it, 
astonishes, surpasses and dominates our 
reason more and more. This psychic 
power, in which no doubt we shall one day 
be forced to recognize the genius of the 
universe itself, appears, as we have often 
observed, to be all-wise, all-seeing and all- 
powerful. It has, when It is pleased to com- 
municate with us or when we are allowed to 
penetrate Into It, an answer for every ques- 
tion and perhaps a remedy for every 111. 
We will not enumerate Its virtues again. It 
will be enough for us to recall with what 
ease it mocks at space, time and all the ob- 
stacles that beset our poor human knowl- 
edge and understanding. We believed It, 
like all that seems to us superior and mar- 
352 



The Unknown Guest 

vellous, the Intangible, Inalienable and In- 
communicable attribute of man, with even 
better reason than his Intelligence. And 
now an accident, strangely belated, it is 
true, tells us that, at one precise point, the 
strangest and least foreseen of all, the 
horse and the dog draw more easily and 
perhaps more directly than ourselves upon 
its mighty reservoirs. By the most inex- 
plicable of anomalies, though one that is 
fairly consistent with the fantastic charac- 
ter of the subliminal, they appear to have 
access to It only at the spot that is most 
remote from their habits and most un- 
known to their propensities, for there is 
nothing in the world about which animals 
trouble less than figures. But is this not 
perhaps because we do not see what goes 
on elsewhere? It so happens that the in- 
finite mystery of numbers can sometimes 
be expressed by a very few simple move- 
ments which are natural to most animals; 
353 



The Unknown Guest 

but there is nothing to tell us that, if we 
could teach the horse and the dog to attach 
to these same movements the expression of 
other mysteries, they would not draw upon 
them with equal facility. It has been suc- 
cessfully attempted to give them a more or 
less clear idea of the value of a few figures 
and perhaps of the course and nature of 
certain elementary operations ; and this ap- 
pears to have been enough to open up to 
them the most secret regions of mathe- 
matics, in which every question is an- 
swered beforehand. It is not wholly illu- 
sive to suppose that, if we could impart to 
them, for instance, a similar notion of the 
future, together with a manner of convey- 
ing to us what they see there, they might 
also have access to strange visions of an- 
other class, which are jealously kept from 
us by the too-watchful guardians of our 
intelligence. There is an opportunity here 
for experiments which will doubtless prove 
354 



The Unknown Guest 

exceedingly arduous, for the future Is not 
so easily seen and above all not so easily 
interpreted and expressed as a number. It 
is possible, moreover, that, when we know 
how to set about it, we shall obtain most 
of the human mediumistic phenomena : rap- 
ping, the moving of objects, materialization 
even and Heaven knows what other sur- 
prises held in store for us by that astound- 
ing subliminal to whose fancy there appears 
to be no bounds. In any case, if we accept 
the divining of numbers, as we are almost 
forced to do, It Is almost certain that the 
divining of other matters must follow. An 
unexpected breach Is made in the wall be- 
hind which lie heaped the great secrets that 
seem to us, as our knowledge and our civi- 
lization Increase, to become stronger and 
more inaccessible. True, It Is a narrow 
breach; but it Is the first that has been 
opened In that part of the hitherto uncran- 
nled wall which Is not turned towards man- 
355 



The Unknown Guest 

kind. What will issue through it ? No one 
can foretell what we may hope. 

37 

What astonishes us most is that this reve- 
lation has been so long delayed. How are 
we to explain that man has lived to this day 
with his domestic animals never suspecting 
that they harboured mediumistic or sub- 
liminal faculties as extraordinary as those 
which he vaguely felt himself to possess? 
One would have in this connection to study 
the mysterious practices of ancient India 
and of Egypt ; the numerous and persistent 
legends of animals talking, guiding their 
masters and foretelling the future; and, 
nearer to ourselves, in history proper, all 
that science of augury and soothsaying 
which derived its omens from the flight of 
birds, the inspection of entrails, the appe- 
tite or attitude of the sacred or prophetic 
animals, among which horses were often 
356 



The Unknown Guest 

numbered. We here find one of those in- 
numerous instances of a lost or anticipated 
power which make us suspect that man- 
kind has forestalled or forgotten all that 
we believe ourselves to be discovering. Re- 
member that there is almost always some 
distorted, misapprehended or dimly-seen 
truth at the bottom of the most eccentric 
and wildest creeds, superstitions and leg- 
ends. All this new science of metaphysics 
or of the investigation of our subconscious- 
ness and of unknown powers, which has 
scarcely begun to unveil its first mysteries, 
thus finds landmarks and defaced but recog- 
nizable traces in the old religions, the most 
inexplicable traditions and the most ancient 
history. Besides, the probability of a thing 
does not depend upon undeniably estab- 
lished precedents. While it is almost cer- 
tain that there is nothing new under the 
sun or In the eternity preceding the suns, 
it IS quite possible that the same forces do 
357 



The Unknown Guest 

not always act with the same energy. As 
I observed, nearly twenty years ago, In The 
Treasure of the Humble, at a time when I 
hardly knew at all what I know so imper- 
fectly to-day: 

"A spiritual" — I should have said, a 
psychic — "epoch is perhaps upon us, an 
epoch to which a certain number of analo- 
gies are found in history. For there are 
periods recorded when the soul, in obe- 
dience to unknown laws, seemed to rise to 
the very surface of humanity, whence it 
gave clearest evidence of its existence and 
of its power. ... It would seem, at mo- 
ments such as these, as though humanity" 
— and, I would add to-day, all that lives 
with it on this earth — "were on the point 
of struggling from beneath the crushing 
burden of matter that weighs it down." 

One might in fact believe that a shudder 
which we have not yet experienced is pass- 
358 



The Unknown Guest 

Ing over everything that breathes; that a 
new activity, a new restlessness is permeat- 
ing the spiritual atmosphere which sur- 
rounds our globe; and that the very ani- 
mals have felt its thrill. One might say 
that, by the side of the niggardly private 
spring which would only supply our intelli- 
gence, other streams are spreading and ris- 
ing to the same level in every form of exist- 
ence. A sort of word of command is being 
passed from rank to rank; and the same 
phenomena are bursting forth in every 
quarter of the globe in order to attract our 
attention, as though the obstinately dumb 
genius that lay hidden in the pregnant si- 
lence of the universe, from that of the 
stones, the flowers and the insects to the 
mighty silence of the stars, were at last 
trying to tell us some secret whereby it 
would be better known to us or to itself. It 
Is possible that this is but an illusion. Per- 
haps we are simply more attentive and bet- 
359 



The Unknown Guest 

ter informed than of old. We learn at the 
very instant what happens In every part of 
our earth and we have acquired the habit 
of more minutely observing and examining 
the things that happen. But the Illusion 
would In this case have all the force, all the 
value and all the meaning of the reality and 
would enjoin the same hopes and the same 
obligations. 



360 



CHAPTER V 

THE UNKNOWN GUEST 



CHAPTER V 

THE UNKNOWN GUEST 
I 

WE have now studied certain manifes- 
tations of that which we have called 
In turn and more or less indiscriminately the 
subconscious mind, the subliminal conscious- 
ness and the unknown guest, names to 
which we might add that of the superior 
subconsciousness or superior psychism in- 
vented by Dr. Geley. Granting that these 
manifestations are really proved, It Is no 
longer possible to explain them or rather 
to classify them without having recourse to 
fresh theories. Now we can entertain 
doubts on many points, we can cavil and 
argue; but I defy any one approaching 
these facts In a serious and honest spirit 
to reject them all. It Is permissible to neg- 
363 



The U"^.::o".va Gue>t 

k:: :hr :r:r. ;z:r::rdmary; but there are a 
n : - : i e : : others which haTe beccnne or, 
tc sr e • ^ : re iccorately, are acknofwledged 
to be as freqaent and habitual as any fact 
whatCFcr in normal, ereiyday life. It is 
not difficult to reproduce them at will, pro- 
Tided we place ourselves in the condition 
demanded by their very nature; and, this 
bdng so, there remains no Talid reason for 
excluding them from the domain of science 
in the strict sense of the word. 

Hitherto, all that we have learnt r^ard- 
ing these occurrences is that fhdr origin is 
unknown. It will be said that this is not 
much and that the dascovcry is nothing to 
boast of. I quite agree: to Ina^nc that 
one can e^lain a phenomena by sa^png that 
it is produced by an unknown agency would 
ir.ieei re ehUdish- But it is already srnie- 
::: r :: :. e iriarked its source, nc: : :e 
s: -- ^ -^e: r :" :^e thick: of a fog, ::; :^ 
2J1V zzL e e— iirecdon in order to iiii i 



The Unknown Guest 

way out, but to be concentrating our atten- 
tion on a single spot which is the starting- 
point of all these wonders, so that at each 
Instant we recognize In each phenomenon 
the characteristic customs, methods or fea- 
tures of the same unknown agency. It Is 
very nearly all that we can do for the mo- 
ment; but this first effort Is not wholly to 
be despised. 

2 

It has seemed to us then that it was our 
unknown guest that expressed itself in the 
name of the dead In table-turning and In 
automatic writing and speaking. This un- 
known guest has appeared to us to take 
within us the place of those who are no 
more, to unite Itself perhaps with forces 
that do not die, to visit the grave with the 
object of bringing thence inexplicable phan- 
toms which rise up in front of us fruit- 
lessly or haunt our houses without telling 
us why. We have seen It, in experiments 
365 



The Unknown Guest 

in clairvoyance and intuition, suppressing 
all the obstacles that banish or conceal 
thought and, through bodies that have be- 
come transparent, reading in our very souls 
forgotten secrets of the past, sentiments 
that have not yet taken shape, intentions as 
yet unborn. We have discovered that some 
object once handled by a person now far 
away is enough to make it take part in the 
innermost life of that person, to go deeper 
and rise higher than he does, to see what 
he sees and even what he does not see : the 
landscape that surrounds him, the house 
which he inhabits and also the dangers that 
threaten him and the secret passions by 
which he is stirred. We have surprised 
it wandering hither and thither, at hap- 
hazard, in the future, confounding it with 
the present and the past, not conscious of 
where it is but seeing far and wide, know- 
ing perhaps everything but unaware of the 
importance of what it knows, or as yet in- 



The Unknown Guest 

capable of turning it to account or of mak- 
ing itself understood, at once neglectful and 
overscrupulous, prolix and reticent, useless 
and indispensable. We have seen it, lastly, 
although we had hitherto looked upon it as 
indissolubly and unchangeably human, sud- 
denly emerge from other creatures and 
there reveal faculties akin to ours, which 
commune with them deep down in the deep- 
est mysteries and which equal them and 
sometimes surpass them in a region that 
wrongly appeared to us the only really un- 
assailable province of mankind, I mean the 
obscure and abstruse province of numbers. 
It has many other no less strange and 
perhaps more important manifestations, 
which we propose to examine in a later vol- 
ume, notably its surprising therapeutic vir- 
tues and its phenomena of materialization. 
But, without expressing a premature judg- 
ment on what we do not yet know, per- 
haps we have sketched It with sufficient 
z^7 



The Unknown Guest 

clearness in the foregoing pages to enable 
us henceforward to disentangle certain gen- 
eral and characteristic features from a con- 
fusion of often contradictory lines. 

3 

But, in the first place, does it really exist, 
this tragic and comical, evasive and un- 
avoidable figure which we make no claim to 
portray, but at most to divest of some of its 
shadows? It were rash to affirm it too 
loudly ; but m.eanwhile, in the realms where 
we suppose it to reign, everything happens 
as though it did exist. Do away with it 
and you are obliged to people the world 
and burden your life with a host of hypo- 
thetical and imaginary beings : gods, demi- 
gods, angels, demons, saints, spirits, shells, 
elementals, etherial entities, interplanetary 
intelligences and so on; accept it and all 
those phantoms, without disappearing, for 
they may very well continue to live in its 
368 



The Unknown Guest 

shadow, become superfluous or accessory. 
It is not Intolerant and does not definitely 
eliminate any of the hypotheses by the aid 
of which man has hitherto striven to ex- 
plain what he did not understand, hypothe- 
ses which, in regard to some matters, are 
not inadmissible, although not one of them 
is confirmed ; but it brings them back to it- 
self, absorbs them and rules them without 
annihilating them. If, for instance, to se- 
lect the most defensible theory, one which 
it is sometimes difficult to dismiss absolute- 
ly, if you insist that the discarnate spirits 
take part in your actions, haunt your house, 
inspire your thoughts, reveal your future, It 
will answer: 

"That is true, but it Is still I ; I am dis- 
carnate, or rather I am not wholly incar- 
nate :it is only a small part of my being that 
is embodied in your flesh; and the rest, 
which Is nearly all of me, comes and goes 
freely both among those who once were 
369 



The Unknown Guest 

and among those who are yet to be; and, 
when they seem to speak to you, it is my 
own speech that borrows their customs and 
their voice in order to make you listen and 
to arouse your often slumbering attention. 
If you prefer to deal with superior entities 
of unknown origin, with interplanetary or 
supernatural intelligences, once more it is 
I ; for, since I am not entirely in your body, 
I must needs be elsewhere; and to be else- 
where when one is not held back by the 
weight of the flesh is to be everywhere if 
one so pleases." 

We see, it has a reply to everything, it 
takes every name that we wish and there is 
nothing to limit it, because it lives in a 
world wherein bounds are as illusory as the 
useless words which we employ on earth. 

4 

While It has a reply to everything, cer- 
tain manifestations which it deliberately 
370 



The Unknown Guest 

ascribes to the spirits have brought upon it 
grave and not undeserved reproach. To 
begin with, as Dr. Maxwell observes, it has 
no absolutely fixed doctrine. In nearly 
every country in the world, when it speaks 
in the name of the spirits, it declares that 
they undergo reincarnation and readily re- 
lates their past existences. In England, on 
the contrary, it usually asserts that they 
do not become reincarnated. What does 
this mean? Surely this ignorance or this 
inconsistency on the part of that which ap- 
pears to know everything is very strange! 
And worse, sometimes it attributes to the 
spirits, sometimes to itself or any one or 
anything the revelations which it makes to 
us. When exactly is it speaking the truth? 
At least on two occasions out of three, it de- 
ludes itself or deludes us. If it deceives 
itself, if it is mistaken about a matter in 
which it should be easy for it to know the 
truth, what can it teach us on the subject 
371 



The Unknown Guest 

of a world of whose most elementary laws 
it is ignorant, since it does not even know 
whether it is itself or another that speaks 
to us in the name of that world? Are we 
to believe that it moves in the same dark- 
ness as our poor superficial ego, which it 
pretends so often to enlighten and which 
it does in fact inspire in most of the great 
events of life ? If it deceives us, why does 
it do so? We can see no object: it asks for 
nothing, not for alms, nor prayers, nor 
thoughts, on behalf of those whose mantle 
it assumes for the sole purpose of leading 
us astray. What is the use of those mis- 
chievous and puerile pranks, of those 
ghastly graveyard pleasantries? It must 
lie then for the mere pleasure of lying ; and 
our unknown guest, that infinite and doubt- 
less immortal subconsciousness in which we 
have placed our last hopes, is after all but 
an imbecile, a buffoon or a rank swindler 1 



Z12 



The Unknown Guest 

5 
I do not believe that the truth is as hide- 
ous as this. Our unknown guest does not 
deceive itself any more than it deceives us ; 
but it is we who deceive ourselves. It has 
not the stage to itself; and its voice is not 
the voice that sounds in our ears, which 
were never made to catch the echoes of a 
world that is not like ours. If it could 
speak to us itself and tell us what it knows, 
we should probably at that instant cease to 
be on this earth. But we are immured in 
our bodies, entombed prisoners with whom 
it cannot communicate at will. It roams 
around the walls, it utters warning cries, it 
knocks at every door, but all that reaches us 
is a vague disquiet, an indistinct murmur 
that is sometimes translated to us by a half- 
awakened gaoler who, like ourselves, is a 
lifelong captive. The gaoler does his best ; 
he has his own way of speaking, his fa- 
miliar expressions ; he knows ours and, with 



The Unknown Guest 

the aid of the words which he possesses and 
those which he hears repeated, he tries to 
make us understand what he hardly under- 
stands himself. He does not know exactly 
whence the sounds come which he hears; 
and, according as tempests, wars or riots 
happen to be uppermost at the moment, he 
attributes them to the winds, -to tramping 
soldiers or to frenzied crowds. In other 
words and speaking without metaphor, it 
is the medium who draws from his habitual 
language and from that suggested to him 
by his audience the wherewithal to clothe 
and identify the strange presentiments, the 
unfamiliar visions that come from some un- 
known region. If he believes that the dead 
survive, he will naturally imagine that it is 
the dead who speak to him. If he has a 
favourite spirit, angel, demon or god, he will 
express himself in its name; if he has no 
preconceived opinion, he will not even al- 
lude to the origin of the revelations which 

374 



The Unknown Guest 

he is making. The inarticulate language 
of the subconsciousness necessarily borrows 
that of the normal consciousness; and the 
two become confused into a sort of shifting 
and multiform jargon. And our unknown 
guest, which is not thinking of delivering a 
course of lectures upon its entity, but sim- 
ply giving us as best it can a more or less 
useless warning or a mark of its existence, 
seems to care but little as to the garments 
in which it Is rigged out, having Indeed no 
choice in the matter, for, either because it 
is unable to manifest itself or because we 
are incapable of understanding it, it has to 
be content with whatever comes to hand. 

Besides, if we attribute too exclusively to 
the spirits that which comes from another 
quarter, the mistake is doubtless no great 
one in its eyes; for It is not madness to 
believe that It lives with that which does 
not die In the dead even as with that which 
does not die In ourselves, with that which 

375 



The Unknown Guest 

does not descend into the grave even as with 
that which does not take flesh at the hour 
of birth. 

6 
There is no reason therefore to condemn 
the other theories entirely. Most of them 
doubtless contain something more than a 
particle of truth; in particular, the great 
quarrel between the subconscious school 
and the spiritualists is based on the whole 
upon a misunderstanding. It is quite pos- 
sible and even very probable that the dead 
are all around us, since it is impossible that 
the dead do not live. Our subconsciousness 
must mingle with all that does not die in 
them ; and that which dies in them or rather 
disperses and loses all its importance is but 
the little consciousness accumulated on this 
earth and kept up until the last hour by the 
frail bonds of memory. In all those mani- 
festations of our unknown guest, it is our 
posthumous ego that already lives in us 



The Unknown Guest 

while we are still in the flesh and at mo- 
ments joins that which does not die in those 
who have quitted their body. Then does 
the existence of our unknown guest pre- 
sume the immortality of a part of our- 
selves ? Can one possibly doubt it ? Have 
you ever imagined that you would perish 
entirely? As for me, what I cannot pic- 
ture is the manner in which you would pic- 
ture that total annihilation. But, if you 
cannot perish entirely, it is no less certain 
that those who came before you have not 
perished either; and hence it is not alto- 
gether improbable that we may be able to 
discover them and to communicate with 
them. In this wider sense, the spiritualistic 
theory is perfectly admissible; but what is 
not at all admissible is the narrow and piti- 
ful interpretation which its exponents too 
often give it. They see the dead crowding 
around us like wretched puppets Indissol- 
ubly attached to the insignificant scene of 



The Unknown Guest 

their death by the thousand little threads 
of insipid memories and infantile hobbies. 
They are supposed to be here, blocking up 
our homes, more abjectly human than if 
they were still alive, vague, inconsistent, 
garrulous, derelict, futile and idle, tossing 
hither and thither their desolate shadows, 
which are being slowly swallowed up by si- 
lence and oblivion, busying themselves in- 
cessantly with what no longer concerns 
them, but almost incapable of doing us a 
real service, so much so that, in short, they 
would end by persuading us that death 
serves no purpose, that it neither purifies 
nor exalts, that it brings no deliverance and 
that it is indeed a thing of terror and de- 
spair. 

7 

No, it is not the dead who thus speak 

and act. Besides, why bring them into the 

matter unnecessarily? I could understand 

that we should be obliged to do so if there 

27^ 



The Unknown Guest 

were no similar phenomena outside them; 
but in the intuition and clairvoyance of non- 
spiritualistic mediums and particularly in 
psychometry we obtain communications be- 
tween one subconsciousness and another and 
revelations of unknown, forgotten or future 
incidents which are equally striking, though 
stripped of the vapid gossip and tedious 
reminiscences with which we are over- 
whelmed by defunct persons who are all the 
more jealous to prove their identity inas- 
much as they know that they do not exist. 

It is infinitely more likely that there is a 
strange medley of heterogeneous forces in 
the uncertain regions into which we are 
venturing. The whole of this ambiguous 
drama, with its incoherent crowds, is prob- 
ably enacted round about the dim estuary 
where our normal consciousness flows Into 
our subconsciousness. The consciousness 
of the medium — for we must not forget 
that there Is necessarily always a medium 
379 



The Unknown Guest 

at the sources of these phenomena— the 
consciousness of the medium, obscured by 
the condition of trance but yet the only one 
that possesses our human speech and can 
make itself heard, takes in first and almost 
exclusively what it best understands and 
what most interests it in the stifled and 
mutilated revelations of our unknown 
guest, which for its part communicates with 
the dead and the living and everything that 
exists. The rest, which is the only thing 
that matters, but which is less clear* and less 
vivid because it comes from afar, only very 
rarely makes its difficult way through a 
forest of insignificant talk. We may add 
that our subconsciousness, as Dr. Geley 
very rightly observes, is formed of super- 
posed elements, beginning with the uncon- 
sciousness that governs the instinctive move- 
ments of the organic life of both the species 
and the individual and passing by imper- 
ceptible degrees till it rises to the superior 
380 



The Unknown Guest 

psychism whose power and extent appear 
to have no bounds. The voice of the me- 
dium, or that which we hear within our- 
selves when, at certain moments of excite- 
ment or crisis in our Hves, we become our 
own medium, has therefore to traverse 
three worlds or three provinces : that of the 
atavistic instincts which connect us with the 
animal; that of human or empirical con- 
sciousness ; and lastly that of our unknown 
guest or our superior subconsciousness, 
which links us to immense invisible realities 
and which we may, if we wish, call divine 
or superhuman. Hence it is not surprising 
that the intermediary, be he spiritualist, au- 
tonomist, palingenesist or what he will, 
should lose himself in those wild and 
troubled eddies and that the truth or mes- 
sage which he brings us, tossed and tum- 
bled in every direction, should reach us 
broken, shattered and pulverized beyond 
recognition. 

381 



The Unknown Guest 

For the rest, I repeat, were it not for the 
absurd prominence given to our dead in the 
spiritualistic interpretation, this question of 
origin would have little importance, since 
both life and death are incessantly joining 
and uniting in all things. There are as- 
suredly dead people in all these manifes- 
tations, seeing that we are full of dead peo- 
ple and that the greater part of ourselves 
is at this moment steeped in death, that is 
to say, is already living the boundless life 
that awaits us on the farther side of the 
grave. 

8 

We should be wrong, however, to fix all 
our attention on these extraordinary phe- 
nomena, either those with which we unduly 
connect the deceased or those no less strik- 
ing ones in which we do not believe that 
they take part. They are evidently prec- 
ious points of emergence that enable us ap- 
proximately to mark the extent, the forms 
382 



The Unknown Guest 

and the habits of our mystery. But it Is 
within ourselves, in the silence of the dark- 
ness of our being, where it is ever in mo- 
tion, guiding our destiny, that we should 
strive to surprise that mystery and to dis- 
cover it. And I am not speaking only of the 
dreams, the presentiments, the vague in- 
tuitions, the more or less brilliant inspira- 
tions which are so many more manifesta- 
tions, specific as It were and analogous with 
those that have occupied us. There is an- 
other, a more secret and much more active 
existence which we have scarcely begun to 
study and which Is, If we descend to the 
bed-rock of truth, our only real existence. 
From the darkest corners of our ego It 
directs our veritable life, the one that Is not 
to die, and pays no heed to our thought or 
to anything emanating from our reason, 
which believes that it guides our steps. It 
alone knows the long past that preceded 
our birth and the endless future that will 
383 



The Unknown Guest 

follow our departure from this earth. It is 
itself that future and that past, all those 
from whom we have sprung and all those 
who will spring from us. It represents in 
the individual not only the species but that 
which preceded it and that which will fol- 
low it; and it has neither beginning nor 
end: that is why nothing touches it, noth- 
ing moves it which does not concern that 
which it represents. When a misfortune or a 
3oy befall us, it knows their value instantly, 
knows If they are going to open or to close 
the wells of life. It is the one thing that 
is never wrong. In vain does reason demon- 
strate to it, by irresistible arguments, 
that it is hopelessly at fault: silent un- 
der its immovable mask, whose expression 
we have not yet been able to read, it pur- 
sues its way. It treats us as insignificant 
children, void of understanding, never an- 
swers our objections, refuses what we ask 
and lavishes upon us that which we refuse. 
384 



The Unknown Guest 

If we go to the right, it reconducts us to the 
left. If we cultivate this or that faculty 
which we think that we possess or which we 
would like to possess, it hides it under some 
other which we did not expect and did not 
wish for. It saves us from a danger by im- 
parting to our limbs unforeseen and unerr- 
ing movements and actions which they had 
never made before and which are contrary 
to those which they had been taught to 
make; it knows that the hour has not yet 
come when it will be useless to defend our- 
selves. It chooses our love in spite of the 
revolt of our intelligence or of our poor, 
ephemeral heart. It smiles when we are 
frightened and sometimes it is frightened 
when we smile. And it is always the win- 
ner, humiliating our reason, crushing our 
wisdom and silencing arguments and pas- 
sions alike with the contemptuous hand of 
destiny. The greatest doctors surround 
our sick-bed and deceive themselves and us 
385 



The Unknown Guest 

In foretelling our death or our recovery : it 
alone whispers in our ear the truth that will 
not be denied. A thousand apparently mor- 
tal blows fall upon our head and not a lash 
of its eyelids quivers; but suddenly a tiny 
shock, which our senses had not even trans- 
mitted to our brain, wakes it with a start. 
It sits up, looks around and understands. 
It has seen the crack in the vault that sepa- 
rates the two lives. It gives the signal for 
departure. Forthwith panic spreads from 
cell to cell ; and the innumerous city that we 
are utters yells of horror and distress and 
hustles around the gates of death. 

9 

That great figure, that new being has 
been there, in our darkness, from all time, 
though its awkward and extravagant ac- 
tions, until recently attributed to the gods, 
the demons or the dead, are only now ask- 
ing for our serious attention. It has been 
386 



The Unknown Guest 

likened to an Immense block of which our 
personality is but a diminutive facet; to an 
Iceberg of which we see a few glistening 
prisms that represent our life, while nine- 
tenths of the enormous mass remain buried 
In the shadows of the sea. x^ccordlng to 
Sir Oliver Lodge, It Is that part of our be- 
ing that has not become carnate ; according 
to Gustave Le Bon, it is the "condensed" 
soul of our ancestors, which is true, beyond 
a doubt, but only a part of the truth, for 
we find in it also the soul of the future and 
probably of many other forces which are 
not necessarily human. William James 
saw In It a diffuse cosmic consciousness and 
the chance Intrusion Into our scientifically- 
organized world of remnants and bestiges 
of the primordial chaos. Here are a num- 
ber of Images striving to give us an Idea 
of a reality so vast that we are unable to 
grasp It. It Is certain that what we see 
from our terrestrial life is nothing com- 
387 



The Unknown Guest 

pared with wHat we do not see. Besides, 
if we think of it, it would be monstrous 
and inexplicable that we should be only 
what we appear to be, nothing but our- 
selves, whole and complete in ourselves, 
separated, isolated, circumscribed by our 
body, our mind, our consciousness, our birth 
and our death. We become possible and 
probable only on the conditions that we pro- 
ject beyond ourselves on every side and that 
we stretch in every direction throughout 
time and space. 

lO 

But how^ shall we explain the incredible 
contrast between the immeasurable gran- 
deur of our unknown guest, the assurance, 
the calmness, the gravity of the inner life 
which it leads In us and the puerile and 
sometimes grotesque incongruities of what 
one might call its public existence ? Inside 
us, it is the sovereign judge, the supreme 



The Unknown Guest 

arbiter, the prophet, almost the god omni- 
potent; outside us, from the moment that 
it quits its shelter and manifests itself in 
external actions, it is nothing more than a 
fortune-teller, a bone-setter, a sort of face- 
tious conjuror or telephone-operator, I was 
on the verge of saying a mountebank or 
clown. At what partidilar instant is it 
really itself? Is it seized with giddiness 
when it leaves its lair? Is it we who no 
longer hear it, who no longer understand it, 
as soon as it ceases to speak in a whisper 
and to act in the dark recesses of our life? 
Are we in regard to it the terrified hive in- 
vaded by a huge and inexplicable hand, the 
maddened ant-hill trampled by a colossal 
and incomprehensible foot? Let us not 
venture yet to solve the strange riddle with 
the aid of the little that we know. Let us 
confine ourselves, for the moment, to noting 
on the way some other, rather easier ques- 
tions which we can at least try to answer. 
389 



The Unknown Guest 

First of all, are the facts at issue really 
new ? Was it only yesterday that the exist- 
ence of our unknown guest and its external 
manifestations were revealed to us? Is it 
our attention that makes them appear more 
numerous, or is it the increase in their num- 
ber that at last attracts our attention? 

It does indeed seem that, however far we 
go back in history, we everywhere find the 
same extraordinary phenomena, under 
other names and often in a more glamorous 
setting. Oracles, prophecies, incantations, 
haruspication, "possession," evocation of 
the dead, apparitions, ghosts, miraculous 
cures, levitation, transmission of thought, 
apparent resurrections and the rest are the 
exact equivalent, though magnified by the 
aid of plentiful and obvious frauds of our 
latter-day supernaturalism. Turning in an- 
other direction, we are able to see that psy- 
chical phenomena are very evenly distrib- 
uted over the whole surface of the globe. 
390 



The Unknown Guest 

At all events, there does not appear to be 
any race that Is absolutely or peculiarly re- 
fractory to them. One would be inclined 
to say, however, that they manifest them- 
selves by preference among the most civil- 
ized nations — perhaps because that is 
where they are most carefully sought after 
— and among the most primitive. In short. 
It cannot be denied that we are In the pres- 
ence of faculties or senses, more or less 
latent but at the same time universally dis- 
tributed, which form part of the general 
and unvarying inheritance of mankind. 
But have these faculties or senses under- 
gone evolution, like most of the others? 
And, If they have not done so on our earth, 
do they show traces of an extraplanetary 
evolution? Is there progress or reaction? 
Are they withered and useless branches, or 
buds swollen with sap and promise? Are 
they retreating before the march of intelli- 
gence or invading its domain? 
391 



The Unknown Guest 

II 
M. Ernest Bozzano, one of the most 
learned, most daring and most subtle ex- 
ponents of the new science that is in process 
of formation, in the course of a remarkable 
essay In the Annales des sciences psychi- 
ques,^ gives it as his opinion that they have 
remained stationary and unchanged. He 
considers that they have become in no way 
diffused, generalized and refined, like so 
many others that are much less important 
and useful from the point of view of the 
struggle for life, such as the musical fac- 
ulty, for instance. It does not even seem, 
says M. Bozzano, that it is possible to 
cultivate or develop them systematically. 
The Hindu races in particular, who for 
thousands of years have been devoting 
themselves to the study of these manifesta- 
tions, have arrived at nothing but a better 
knowledge of the empirical methods cal- 

^September 1906. 

392 



The Unknown Guest 

culated to produce them In individuals al- 
ready endowed with these supernormal 
faculties. I do not know to what extent M. 
Bozzano's assertions are beyond dispute. 
They concern historical or remote facts 
which It is very difficult to verify. In any 
case, It is something to have perfected, as 
has been done in India, the empirical 
methods favourable to the production of 
supernormal phenomena. One might even 
say that it is about all that we have the 
right to expect, seeing that, by the author's 
own admission, these faculties are latent in 
every man and that, as has frequently been 
seen, it needs but an illness, a lesion, or 
sometimes even the slightest emotion or a 
mere passing faintness to make them sud- 
denly reveal themselves In an individual 
who seemed most hopelessly devoid of 
them. It Is therefore quite possible that, 
by Improving the methods, by attacking the 
mystery from other quarters, we might ob- 
393 



The Unknown Guest 

tain more decisive results than the Hindus. 
We must remember that our western science 
has but lately interested itself in these prob- 
lems and that it has means of investigating 
and experimenting which the Asiatics never 
possessed. It may even be declared that at 
no time in the existence of our world has 
the scientific mind been better-equipped, 
better-suited to cope with every task, or 
more exact, more skilful and more penetra- 
ting than it is to-day. Because the orien- 
tal empirics have failed, there is no reason 
to believe that it will not succeed in awaken- 
ing and cultivating in every man those 
faculties which would often be of greater 
use to him than those of the intellect itself. 
It is not overbold to suggest that, from 
certain points of view, the true history of 
mankind has hardly begun. 

12 

Nevertheless, in so far as concerns the 
394 



The Unknown Guest 

natural evolution of those faculties, M. 
Bozzano's assertion seems fairly well-justi- 
fied. We do not, In fact, observe a start- 
ling or even appreciable difference between 
what they were and what they are. And 
this anomaly Is the more surprising In as 
much as it Is almost universally accepted 
that a sense or a faculty becomes developed 
in proportion to Its usefulness; and there 
are few, I think, that would have been not 
only more useful but even more necessary 
to man. He has always had a keen and 
primitive Interest In knowing without de- 
lay the most secret thoughts of his fellow- 
man, who Is often his adversary and some- 
times his mortal enemy. He has always 
had an Interest no less great in immediately 
transmitting those thoughts through space, 
in seeing beyond the continents and seas, in 
going back Into the past. In advancing into 
the future, in being able to find in his mem- 
ory at will not only all the acquirements of 

395 



The Unknown Guest 

his personal experience but also those of 
his ancestors, in communicating with the 
dead and perhaps with the sovereign intel- 
ligence diffused over the universe, in discov- 
ering hidden springs and treasures, in escap- 
ing the harsh and depressing laws of matter 
and gravity, in relieving pain, in curing the 
greater number of his disorders and even 
in restoring his limbs, not to mention many 
other miracles which he could work if he 
knew all the mighty forces that doubtless 
slumber in the dark recesses of his life. 

Is this once more an unexpected charac- 
ter of the eccentric physiology of our un- 
known guest? Here are faculties more 
precious than the most precious faculties 
that have made us what we are, faculties 
whose magic buds sprout on every side un- 
derneath our intelligence but have never 
burst into flower, as though a wind from 
another sphere had killed them with its icy 
breath. Is it because it occupies itself first 
396 



The Unknown Guest 

and foremost with the species that It thus 
neglects the Individual? But, after all, the 
species is only an aggregate of successive 
individuals; and its evolution consequently 
depends upon their evolution. There would 
therefore have been an evident advantage 
to the species in developing faculties that 
would perhaps have carried It much far- 
ther and much higher than has been done 
by Its brain-power, which alone has pro- 
gressed. If there Is no evolution for them 
here, do they develop elsewhere? What 
are those powers which exist outside and 
Independent of the laws of this earth? Do 
they then belong to other worlds? But, If 
so, what are they doing in ours? One 
would sometimes think, at the sight of so 
much neglectfulness, uncertainty and incon- 
sistency, that man's evolution had been in- 
tentionally retarded by a superior will, as 
though that will feared that he was going 
too fast, that he was anticipating some pre- 

397 



The Unknown Guest 

established order and moving prematurely 
out of his appointed plane. 

13 

And the riddles accumulate which we 
cannot hope to solve. It has been said that 
these abnormal faculties are communica- 
tions or infiltrations, themselves abnormal, 
which have found their way through the 
partitions that separate our consciousness 
from our subconsciousness. This is very 
likely, but it is only a minor side of the 
question. It would be important before all 
to know what that subconsciousness repre- 
sents, whither it tends and with what It it- 
self is communicating. Is the cerebral 
form of knowledge a necessary or an acci- 
dental stage? Is the impersonal form 
which it takes in the subconsciousness the 
only true one? Is there really, as every- 
thing seems to prove, a hopeless incompati- 
bility between our Intellectual faculties and 
398 



The Unknown Guest 

those faculties of uncertain origin, to such 
an extent that the latter are unable to mani- 
fest themselves except when the former are 
weakened or temporarily suspended? It 
has, at any rate, been observed that they 
are hardly ever exercised simultaneously. 
Are we to believe that, at a given moment, 
mankind or the genius that presides over its 
destinies had to make an exclusive and aw- 
ful choice between cerebral energy and the 
mysterious forces of the subconsciousness 
and that we still find traces of its hesita- 
tions in our organism? What would have 
become of a race of men in which the sub- 
consciousness had triumphed over the 
brain? Is not this the case with animals; 
and would not the race have remained 
purely animal ? Or else would not this pre- 
ponderance of a subconscious element more 
powerful than that of the animals and al- 
most independent of our body have re- 
sulted in the disappearance of life as we 
399 



The Unknown Guest 

know It; and should we not even now be 
leading the life which we shall probably 
lead when we are dead? Here are a num- 
ber of questions to which there are no an- 
swers and which are nevertheless perhaps 
not so idle as one might at first believe. 

14 

Amidst this antagonism, whose triumph 
are we to hope for? Is any alliance be- 
tween the two opposing forces for ever im- 
possible so long as we are in the flesh? 
What are we to do meanwhile? If a 
choice be inevitable, which way will our 
choice incline; and which victim shall we 
sacrifice ? Shall we listen to those who tell 
us that there is nothing more to be gained 
or learnt in those inhospitable regions 
where all our bewildering phenomena have 
been known since man first was man? Is 
it true that occultism — as it is very improp- 
erly called, for the knowledge which it 
400 



The Unknown Guest 

seeks Is no more occult than any other — 
Is It true that occultism Is marking time, 
that It Is becoming hopelessly entangled In 
the same doubtful facts and that It has not 
taken a single step forward since Its rena- 
scence more than fifty years ago ? One must 
be entirely Ignorant of the wonderful efforts 
of those fruitful years to venture upon 
such an assertion. This is not the place to 
discuss the question, which would require 
full and careful treatment; but we may 
safely say that until now there is no science 
which in so short a time has brought order 
out of such a chaos, ascertained, checked 
and classified such a quantity of facts, or 
more rapidly awakened, cultivated and 
trained In man certain faculties which he 
had never seriously been believed to pos- 
sess; and furthermore none which has 
caused to be recognized as incontestable 
and thus introduced into the circle of the 
realities whereon we base our lives a num- 
401 



; 



The Unknown Guest 

ber of unlikely phenomena which had 
hitherto been contemptuously passed over. 
We are still, it is true, waiting for the do- 
mestication of the new force, its practical 
application to daily use. We are still wait- 
ing for the all-revealing, decisive manifes- 
tation which will remove our last doubts 
and throw light upon the problem down to 
its very source. But let us admit that we 
are likewise waiting for this manifestation 
in the great majority of sciences. In any 
case, we are already in the presence of an 
astonishing mass of well-weighed and veri- 
fied materials which, until now, had been 
taken for the refuse of dreams, fragments 
of wild legends, meaningless and unimpor- 
tant. For more than three centuries, the 
science of electricity remained at very much 
the same point at which our psychical 
sciences stand to-day. Men were record- 
ing, accumulating, trying to interpret a host 
of odd and futile phenomena, toying with 
402 



The Unknown Guest 

Ramsden's machine, with Leyden jars, with 
Volta's rough battery. They thought that 
they had discovered an agreeable pastime, 
an Ingenious plaything for the laboratory or 
study; and they had not the slightest sus- 
picion that they were touching the sources 
of an universal, irresistible, Inexhaustible 
power, Invisibly present and active in all 
things, that would soon Invade the surface 
of our globe. Nothing tells us that the 
psychic forces of which we are beginning 
to catch a glimpse have not similar sur- 
prises in store for us, with this difference, 
that we are here concerned with energies 
and mysteries which are loftier, grander 
and doubtless fraught with graver conse- 
quences, since they affect our eternal des- 
tinies, traverse alike our life and our death 
and extend beyond our planet. 

15 

It is not true therefore that the psychical 
403 



The Unknown Guest 

sciences have said their last word and that 
we have nothing more to expect from them. 
They have but just awakened or reawak- 
ened; and, to postdate Guyau's prediction 
by a hundred years, we might say, with 
them in our minds, that the twentieth cen- 
tury "will end with discoveries as ill-formu- 
lated but perhaps as important in the moral 
world as those of Newton and Laplace in 
the astronomical world." But, though we 
have much to hope from them, that is no 
reason why we should look to them for 
everything and abandon in their favour 
that which has brought us where we are. 
The choice of which we spoke, between the 
brain and the subconsciousness, has been 
made long ago; and it is not our part to 
make it over again. We are carried along 
by a force acquired in the course of two or 
three thousand years ; and our methods, like 
our intellectual habits, have of themselves 
become transformed into a sort of minor 
404 



The Unknown Guest 

subconsciousness superposed upon the 
major subconsciousness and sometimes min- 
gling with it. Henri Bergson, in his very 
fine presidential address to the Society for 
Psychical Research on the 28th of May, 
19 13, said that he had sometimes won- 
dered what would have happened if mod- 
ern science, Instead of setting out from 
mathematics, Instead of bringing all Its 
forces to converge on the study of matter, 
had begun by the consideration of mind; 
If Kepler, Galileo and Newton, for In- 
stance, had been psychologists : 

"We should certainly," said he, "have 
had a psychology of which to-day we can 
form no Idea, any more than before Galileo 
we could have Imagined what our physics 
would be; a psychology that probably 
would have been to our present psychology 
what our physics Is to Aristotle's. Foreign 
to every mechanistic Idea, not even conceiv- 
ing the possibility of such an explanation, 
405 



The Unknown Guest 

science would have enquired into, instead of 
dismissing a priori, facts such as those 
which you study; perhaps ^psychical re- 
search' would have stood out as its princi- 
pal preoccupation. The most general laws 
of mental activity once discovered (as, in 
fact, the fundamental laws of mechanics 
w^ere discovered) , we should have passed 
from mind, properly so-called, to life; bi- 
ology would have been constituted, but a 
vitalist biology, quite different from ours, 
which would have sought behind the sen- 
sible forms of living beings the inward, 
invisible force of which the sensible forms 
are the manifestations." 

It would therefore in the very first days 
of its activity have encountered all these 
strange problems: telepathy, materializa- 
tions, clairvoyance, miraculous cures, 
knowledge of the future, the possibility of 
survival, interplanetary intelligence and 
many others, which it has neglected hither- 
406 



The Unknown Guest 

to and which, thanks to its neglect, are still 
in their infancy. But, as the human mind 
is not able to follow two diametrically op- 
posite directions at the same time, it would 
necessarily have rejected the mathematical 
sciences. A steamship coming from an- 
other hemisphere, one in which men's 
minds had taken, unknown to ourselves, the 
road which our own has actually taken, 
would have seemed to us as wonderful, as 
incredible as the phenomena of our sub- 
consciousness seem to us to-day. We should 
have gone very far in what at present we 
call the unknown or the occult; but we 
should have known hardly anything of phy- 
sics, chemistry or mechanics, unless, which 
is very probable, we had come upon them 
by another road as we travelled round the 
occult. It Is true that certain nations, the 
Hindus particularly, the Egyptians and 
perhaps the Incas, as well as others, in all 
probability, who have not left sufficient 
407 



The Unknown Guest 

traces, thus went to work the other way 
and obtained nothing decisive. Is this 
again a consequence of the hopeless incom- 
patibility between the faculties of the brain 
and those of the subconsciousness? Pos- 
sibly; but we must not forget that we are 
speaking of nations which never possessed 
our intellectual habits, our passion for pre- 
cision, for verification, for experimental 
certainty; Indeed, this passion has only 
been fully developed in ourselves within 
the last two or three centuries. It Is 
to be presumed therefore that the Euro- 
pean would have gone much farther in the 
other direction than the Oriental. Where 
would he have arrived? Endowed with a 
different brain, naturally clearer, more ex- 
acting, more logical, less credulous, more 
practical, closer to realities, more attentive 
to details, but with the scientific side of his 
intelligence uncultivated, would he have 
gone astray or would he have met the truths 
408 



The Unknown Guest 

which we are still seeking and which may 
well be more important than all our mate- 
rial conquests. Ill-prepared, ill-equipped, 
ill-balanced, lacking the necessary ballast of 
experiments and proofs, would he have 
been exposed to the dangers familiar to all 
the too-mystical nations? It is very diffi- 
cult to imagine so. But the hour has now 
perhaps come to try without risk what he 
could not have done without grave peril. 
While abandoning no whit of his under- 
standing, which is small compared with the 
boundless scope of the subconsciousness, 
but which Is sure, tried and docile, he can 
now embark upon the great adventure and 
try to do that which has not been done be- 
fore. It is a matter of discovering the con- 
necting link between the two forces. We 
are still ignorant of the means of aiding, 
encouraging, developing and taming the 
greater of the two and of bringing it closer 
to us; the quest will be the most difficult, 
409 



The Unknown Guesf • 

the most mysterious and, In certain respects, 
the most dangerous that mankind has ever 
undertaken. 'But we can say to ourselves, 
without fear of being very far wrong, that 
it is the best task at the moment. In any 
case, this is the first time since man has 
existed that he will be fronting the un- 
known with such good weapons, even as it 
is also the first time since its awakening 
that his intelligence, which has reached a 
summit from which it can understand al- 
most everything, will at last receive help 
from outside and hear a voice that is some- 
thing more than the echo of its own. 



THE END 



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